The Rudolf Steiner Archive

My dear friends,

My dear friends, it is really difficult in our time to meet with full understanding when one speaks out of the sources of what we call Spiritual Science.

I have not in mind so much the difficulty of being understood among the individuals whom we encounter in life, but much more of being comprehensible to the cultural streams, the various world-conceptions and feelings which confront us at the present time.

When we consider European life we find in the first place a great difficulty which has sprung from the following cause. European life at the moment of passing over from mere sense perceptions to thinking about percepts—and this is effected by every individual in every moment of his waking life—does not feel how intimately connected is the thought-content with what we are as human beings.

People think thoughts, they form concepts, and they have the consciousness that through these thoughts and concepts they are, as it were, learning something of the world, that the images in fact reproduce something of the world. This is the consciousness people have. Each one who walks along the street has the feeling that because he sees the trees etc. concepts come to life, and that the concepts are inner presentations of what he perceives, and that he thus in some way takes the world of external percepts into himself and then lives them over again.

In the rarest cases, one can say practically never, is it brought to consciousness in the European world-conception that the thought, the act of thinking, is an actuality in our inner self as man, that we do something by thinking, that thinking is an inner activity, an inner work.

I called your attention here once to the fact that every thought is essentially different from what people usually believe it to be. People take it to be a reproduction of something perceptible. But it is not recognised as a form-builder, a moulder. Every thought that arises in us seizes, as it were, upon our inner life and shares (above all so long as we are growing) in our whole human construction. It already takes part in our structure before we are born and belongs to the forming forces of our nature. It goes on working continually and again and again replaces what dies away in us. So it is not only the case that we perceive our concepts externally, but we are always working upon our being through our thoughts, we work the whole time anew upon our forming and fashioning through what we conceive in ideas.

Seen with the eyes of spiritual science every thought appears like a head with a sort of continuation downwards, so that with every thought we actually insert in us something like a shadowy outline, a phantom, of ourselves; not exactly like us, but as similar as a shadow-picture. This phantom of ourselves must be inserted, for we are continuously losing something, something is being destroyed, is actually crumbling away. And what the thought inserts into our human form, preserves us, generally speaking, until our death. Thought is thus at the same time a definite inner activity, a working on our own construction.

The western world-concept has practically no knowledge of this at all. People do not notice, they have no inner feeling of how the thought grips them, how it really spreads itself out in them. Now and again a man will feel in breathing—though for the most part it is no longer noticed—that the breath spreads out in him, and that breathing has something to do with his re-building and regeneration. This applies also to thoughts, but the European scarcely feels any longer that the thought is actually striving all the time to become man, or, better said, to form the human shape.

But unless we come to a feeling of such forces within us we can hardly reach a right understanding, based on inner feeling and life, of what spiritual science really desires. For spiritual science is actually not active at all in what thought yields us inasmuch as it reproduces something external; it works in the life element of thought, in this continuous shaping process of the thought.

Therefore it has been very difficult for many centuries to speak of spiritual science or to be understood when it was spoken of, because this last characterised consciousness became increasingly lost to European humanity. In the Oriental world-conception this feeling about thought which I have just expressed exists in a high degree. At least the consciousness exists in a high degree that one must seek for this feeling of an inner experience of thought. Hence comes the inclination of the Oriental for meditation; for meditation should be a familiarising oneself with the shaping forces of thought, a becoming aware of the living feeling of the thought. That the thought accomplishes something in us should become known to us during meditating. Therefore we find in the Orient such expressions as: A becoming one, in meditation, with Brahma, with the fashioning process of the world. What is sought in the Oriental world-conception is the consciousness that when one rightly lives into the thought, one not only has something in oneself, not only thinks, but one becomes at home in the fashioning forces of the world. But it is rigidified, because the Oriental world-conception has neglected to acquire an understanding for the Mystery of Golgotha. To be sure, the Oriental world-conception of which we have yet to speak—is eminently fitted to become at home in the forming forces of thought life, but nevertheless in so doing, it comes into a dying element, into a network of abstract, unliving conceptions. So that one could say: whereas the right way is to experience the life of the thought-world, the Oriental world-conception becomes at home in a reflection of the life of thought. One should become at home in the thought-world as if one were transposing oneself into a living being; but there is a difference between a living being and a reproduction of a living being, let us say a paper mache copy. The oriental world-conception, whether Brahmanism, Buddhism, the Chinese and Japanese religions, does not become at home in the living being, but in something which may be described as a copy of the thought-world, which is related to the living thought-world, as the papier-mache organism is related to the living organism.

This then is the difficulty, as well in the West as in the East. One is less understood in the West, since in general not much consciousness exists there of these living, forming forces of thought; in the East one is not understood aright, since there people have not a genuine consciousness of the living nature of thought, but only of the dead reproduction, of the stiff, abstract weaving of thoughts.

Now you must be clear whence all that I have just analysed actually comes. You will all remember the account of the Moon evolution given in my book Occult Science. Man in his own evolution has taken his proper share in all that has taken place as Saturn, Sun and Moon evolutions, and he then further shares in what comes about as Earth evolution. When you call to mind the Moon evolution as described in my Occult Science you find that during that time the separation of the moon planet from the sun took place; that it proceeded for the first time in a distinct, definite way. Thus such a separation actually took place. We can say that whereas before there had been a kind of interconnected condition of the planetary world, at the separation of the moon from the sun there now took their course side by side the Moon evolution and the Sun evolution. This separate state was of great significance, as you can gather from Occult Science. Man as he now is could not have arisen if this separation had not taken place. But on the other hand, with every such event is intimately connected the emergence of a certain one-sidedness. It came about that certain beings of the Hierarchy of the Angeloi, who were at the human stage during the Moon evolution, at that time rebelled against, showed themselves in antipathy to, uniting again with the Sun. Thus the Moon broke away, and at the later reunion with the Sun they refused to take this step, and be reunited with the Sun.

All Luciferic staying behind rests upon an unwillingness to take part in later phases of evolution. And hence, on the one hand, the Luciferic element originated in the fact that certain beings from the Hierarchy of the Angeloi, who were human at that time, were not willing to reunite with the Sun in the last part of the Old Moon time. To be sure, they were obliged to descend again, but in their feeling, in their inner nature, they preserved a longing for the Moon existence. They were out of place, they were not at home in the existing evolution; they felt themselves to be actually Moon-beings. Their remaining behind consisted in this. The host of Luciferic beings who then in their further development descended upon our Earth naturally contained in their ranks this kind of being. They also live in us in the manner I have indicated in one of the last lectures. And it is they who will not let the consciousness arise, in our Western thinking, that thinking is inwardly alive. They want to keep it of a Moon-nature, cut off from the inner life element that is connected with the Sun, they want to keep it in the condition of separation. And their activity produces the result that man does not get a conscious feeling: thinking is connected with inner fashioning, but feels instead that thinking is only connected with the external, precisely with that which is separated. Thus in respect of thinking they evoke a feeling that it can only reproduce the external; that one cannot grasp the inner formative living element with it, but can only grasp the external. Thus they falsify our thinking.

It was in fact the karma of Western humanity to make acquaintance with these spirits, who falsify thinking in this manner, alter it, externalise it, who endeavour to give it the stamp of only being of service in reproducing outer things and not grasping the inner living element. It was apportioned to the karma of the Oriental peoples to be preserved from this kind of Luciferic element. Hence they retained more the consciousness that in thinking one must seek for the inwardly forming, shaping of the human being, for what unites him inwardly with the living thought-world of the universe. It was allotted to the Greeks to form the transition between the one and the other.

Since the Orientals have made little acquaintance with that Luciferic element I have just characterised, they have no real idea that one can also come into connection with the living element of thinking about the external. What they get hold of in this connection always seems made of paper mache they have little understanding of applying thinking to outer things. Lucifer must of course cooperate in the activity which I have just described, by which man feels the inclination to meditate on the outer world. But then it is like the swing of the pendulum to one side, man goes too far in this activity—towards the external. That is the common peculiarity of all life; it swings out sometimes to the one side, sometimes to the other. There must be the swinging out, but one must find the way back from the one to the other, from the Oriental to the Occidental. The Greeks were to find the transition from Oriental to Occidental. The Oriental would have fallen completely into rigid abstractions—has, indeed, partly done so, abstractions which are pleasing to many people—if Greece had not influenced the world. If we base our judgment simply on what we have now considered, we shall find in Greece the tendency to make thoughts inwardly formative and alive.

Now if you examine both Greek literature and Grecian art you will everywhere find how the Greek strove to produce the human form from his own inner experiencing; this is so in sculpture as well as in poetry, in fact in philosophy too. If you acquaint yourself with the manner in which Plato still sought, not to found an abstract philosophy, but to collect a group of men who talk with one another and exchange their views, so that in Plato we find no world-concept (we have only discussions) but men who converse, in whom thought works humanly, thoughts externalise, you will find this corroborated. Thus even in philosophy we do not have the thought expressing itself so abstractly, but it clothes itself as it were in the human being representing it.

When in this way one sees Socrates converse, one cannot speak of Socrates on the one hand and of a Socratic world-conception on the other. It is a unity, one complete whole. One could not imagine in ancient Greece that someone—let us say, like a modern philosopher—came forward who had founded an abstract philosophy, and who placed himself before people and said: this is not the correct philosophy. That would have been impossible—it would only be possible in the case of a modern philosopher, (for this rests secretly in the mind of them each). The Greek Plato, however, depicts Socrates as the embodied world-conception, and one must imagine that the thoughts have no desire to be expressed by Socrates merely to impart knowledge of the world, but that they go about in the figure of Socrates and are related to people in the same way as he is. And to pour, as it were, this element of making thought human into the external form and figure, constitutes the greatness in the works of Homer and Sophocles, and in all the figures of sculpture and poetry which Greece has created. The reason why the sculptured gods of Grecian statuary are so human is that what I have just expressed was poured into them. This is at the same time a proof of how humanity's evolution in a spiritual respect strove as it were to grasp the living element of man from the thought-element of the cosmos and then to give it form. Hence the Grecian works of art appear to us (to Goethe they appeared so in the most eminent sense) as something which of its kind is hardly to be enhanced, to be brought to greater perfection, because all that was left of the ancient revelation of actively working and weaving thoughts had been gathered up and poured into the form. It was like a striving to draw together into the human form all that could be found as thoughts passing from within outwards, and this became in Greece philosophy, art, sculpture. (See Diagram (a) p.8a)

A more modern age has another mission, the present time has an entirely different task. We now have the task of giving back to the universe that which there is in man. (Diagram (b)). The whole pre-Grecian evolution led to man's taking from the universe all that he could discover of the living element of the human form in order to epitomise it. That is the unending greatness of Greek art—that the whole preceding world is actually epitomised and given form in it. Now we have the task reversed—the human being, who has been immeasurably deepened through the Mystery of Golgotha, who has been inwardly seized in his cosmic significance, is now to be given back again to the universe.

You must, however, inscribe in your souls that the Greeks had not, of course, the Christian view of the Mystery of Golgotha; for them everything flowed together out of the cosmic wisdom:

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

And now picture the immense, the immeasurable advance in the evolution of humanity when the Being who had formerly worked from the cosmos and who could only be known from the cosmos, and whom man could express in the earthly stage in the element of Form:—when this Being passed out of the cosmos into the earth, became man, and lives on in human evolution.

That which was sought out in the cosmos in pre-Grecian times now came into the earth, and that which had been poured out into form, was now itself in human evolution. (c) Naturally (I have therefore indicated it with dots) it is not yet rightly known—it is not yet rightly experienced, but it lives in man, and men have the task of giving it back gradually to the cosmos. We can picture this quite concretely, this giving back to the cosmos of what we have received through Christ. We must only not struggle against this giving back. One can really cling closely to the wonderful words: ‘I am with you all the days until the end of the Earth period.’

This means: what Christ has to reveal to us is not exhausted with what stands in the Gospel. He is not among us as one who is dead, who once upon a time permitted to be poured into the Gospels what he wished to bring upon earth, but he is in earthly evolution as a living Being. We can work through to him with our souls, and he then reveals himself to us as he revealed himself to the Evangelists. The gospel is therefore not something that was once there and then came to an end, the gospel is a continuous revelation. One stands as it were ever confronting the Christ, and looking up to Him, one waits again for revelation.

Assuredly he—whoever he may have been—who said: ‘I should still have much to write but all the books in the world could not contain it’—assuredly he, John, was entirely right. For if he had written all that he could write, he would have had to write all that would gradually in the course of human evolution result from the Christ event. He wished to indicate: Wait! Only wait! What all the books in the world could not contain will come to pass. We have heard the Christ, but our descendants will also hear Him, and so we continuously, perpetually, receive the Christ revelation. To receive the Christ revelation means: to acquire light upon the world from Him. And we must give back the truths to the cosmos from the centre of our heart and soul.

Hence we may understand as living Christ-revelation what we have received as Spiritual Science. He it is who tells us how the earth has originated, the nature of the human being, what conditions the earth passed through before it became earth. All that we have as cosmology, and give back to the universe, all this is revealed to us by Him. It is the continuous revelation of Christ to feel such a mood as this: that one receives the cosmos from the Christ in an inward spiritual way, drawn together as it were, and as one has received it to relate it to the world with understanding, so that one no longer looks up to the moon and stares at it as a great skittles-ball with which mechanical forces have moved skittles in the cosmos and which from these irregularities has acquired wrinkles, and so on—but recognises what the moon indicates, how it is connected with the Christ-nature and the Jahve-nature. It is a continuous revelation of the Christ to allot again to the outer world what we have received from Him. It is at first a process of knowledge. It begins with an intellectual process, later it will be other processes. Processes of inner feeling will result which arise from ourselves and pour themselves into the cosmos, such processes as these will arise.

But you gather something else from what I have just explained. When you observe this motion- (Diagram (a) p.10a) where one has gathered up out of the cosmos, as it were, the component parts of the human being, which have in the Greek world-concepts, in Greek art, then flowed together to the whole human being, then you will understand: In Greece the evolution of humanity strove towards the plastic form, sculptured-form, and what they have reached in such form, we cannot as a matter of fact succeed in copying. If we imitate it nothing true or genuine results. That is therefore a certain apex in human evolution. One can in fact say this stream of humanity strives in Greece in sculpture towards a concentration of the entire human evolution preceding Greece.

When, on the contrary, one takes what has to happen here (b) it is what could be called a distribution of the component parts of man into the cosmos. You can follow this in its details. We assign our physical body to Saturn, the etheric body to the Sun, the astral body to the Moon, our Ego-organisation to the Earth. We really distribute man into the universe, and it can be said that the whole construction of Spiritual Science is based upon a distribution, a bringing again into movement, of what is concentrated in the human being. The fundamental key of this new world-conception (diagram (b)) is a musical one; of the old world (a) is a plastic one. The fundamental key of the new age is truly musical, the world will become more and more musical. And to know how man is rightly placed in the direction towards which human evolution is striving, means to know that we must strive towards a musical element, that we dare not recapitulate the old plastic element, but must strive towards a musical one.

I have frequently mentioned that on an important site in our Building there will be set up the figure of archetypal man, which one can also speak of as the Christ, and which will have Lucifer on the one side and Ahriman on the other. What is concentrated in the Christ we take out and distribute again in Lucifer and Ahriman, in so far as it is to be distributed. What was welded together plastically in the one figure we make musical, inasmuch as we make it a kind of melody: Christus-Lucifer-Ahriman.

Our Building is really formed on this principle. Our whole Building bears the special imprint in it: to bring plastic forms into musical movement. That is its fundamental character. If you do not forget that, in mentioning something like this, one is never to be arrogant, but to remain properly humble, and if you remember that in all that concerns our work on this Building only the first most imperfect steps have been taken, you will not misunderstand what is meant when I speak about it. It is of course not meant that anything at all of what floats before us as distant ideal is also only attained in the farthest future; but a beginning can be sought in that direction,—this one can say. More shall not be said than, that a beginning is desired.

But when you compare this beginning with that which has undergone a certain completion in Greece, with the infinite perfection of the plastic principle in, for instance, the Greek you find polaric difference. In Greece everything strives for form. An Acropolis figure of Athena, or in the architecture of the Acropolis, or a Greek Temple, they stand there in order to remain eternally rigid in this form, in order to preserve for man a picture of what beauty in form can be.

Such a work as our Building, even when one day it becomes more perfect, will always stand there in such a way that one must actually say: this Building always stimulates one to overcome it as such, in order to come out through its form into the infinite. These columns and in particular the forms connected with the columns, and even what is painted and moulded, is all there in order, so to say, to break through the walls, in order to protest against the walls standing there and in order to dissolve the forms, dissolve them into a sort of etheric eye, so that they may lead one out into the far spaces of the Cosmic thought-world.

One will experience this building in the right way if one has the feeling in observing it that it dissolves, it overcomes its own boundaries; all that forms walls really wants to escape into cosmic distances. Then one has the right feeling. With a Greek temple one feels as if, one would like best to be united for ever with what is firmly enclosed by the walls and with what can only come in through the walls. Here, with our Building, one will particularly feel: If only these walls were not so tiresomely there—for wherever they stand they really want to be broken through, and lead out further into world of the cosmos. This is indeed how this Building should be formed, according to the tasks of our age, really out of the tasks of our age.

Since we have not only spoken for years, my dear friends, on the subjects of Spiritual Science, but have discussed with one another the right attitude of mind towards what is brought to expression through Spiritual Science, it can also be understood that when something in the world is criticised, one does not mean it at all as absolute depreciation, absolute blame, but that one uses phrases of apparent condemnation in order to characterise facts in the right connection.

When, therefore, one reproaches a world-historical personality, this does not imply that one would like to declare at the same time one's desire—at least in the criticism of this person—to be an executioner who cuts off his head—figuratively spoken—by expressing a judgment. This is the case with modern critics, but not with someone imbued with the attitude of mind of Spiritual Science. Please also take what I have now to say in the sense indicated through these words.

An incision had at some time to be made in mankind's evolution; it had at some time to be said: This is now the end of all that has been handed down from old times to the present: something new must being (diagram Page 109 (a)). This incision was not made all at once, it was in fact made in various stages, but it meets us in history quite clearly. Take, for instance, such an historical personality as the Roman Emperor Augustus, whose rule in Rome coincided with the birth of the current which we trace from the Mystery of Golgotha. It is very difficult today to make people fully clear wherein lay the quite essentially new element which entered Western evolution through the Emperor Augustus, as compared with what had already existed in Western civilisation till then, under the influence of the Roman Republic. One must in fact make use of concepts to which people are little accustomed today, if one wishes to analyse something of this sort. When one reads history books presenting the time of the Roman Republic as far as the Empire, one has the feeling that the historians wrote as if they imagined that the Roman Consuls and Roman Tribunes acted more or less in the manner of a President of a modern republic. Not much difference prevails whether Niebuhr or Mommsen speaks of the Roman Republic or of a modern republic, because nowadays people see everything through the spectacles of what they see directly in their own environment. People cannot imagine that what a man in earlier times felt and thought, felt too as regards public life, was something essentially different from what the present-day man feels. It was however radically different, and one does not really understand the age of the Roman Republic if one does not furnish oneself with a certain idea which was active in the conception of the old republican Roman, and which he took over into the age which is called the Roman Empire.

The ancient kings, from Romulus to Tarquinius Superbus, were to the ancient Romans actual beings, who were intimately connected with the divine, with the divinely spiritual world rulership. And the ancient Roman of the time of the kings could not grasp the significance of his kings otherwise than by thinking: In all that takes place there is something of the nature of what happened in the time of Numa Pompilius, who visited the nymph Egeria in order to know how he should act. From the gods, or from spirit-land one received the inspirations for what had to be done upon earth. That was a living consciousness. The kings were the bridges between what happened on earth and what the gods out of the spiritual world wished to come about.

Thus a feeling extended over public life which was derived from the old world conception—namely, that what a man does in the world is connected with what forms him from the cosmos, so that currents continually stream in from the cosmos. Nor was this idea confined to the government of mankind. Think of Plato: he did not chisel things out in his soul as ideas, but received them as outflow of the divine being. So too in ancient Rome they did not say to themselves: One man rules other men, but they said: The gods rule men, and he who in human form is governing, is only the vessel into which the impulses of the gods flow. This feeling lasted into the time of the Roman Republic when it was related to the Consular office. The Consular dignity in ancient times was not that genuine so-called bourgeois-element, as it were, which a state- government increasingly feels itself to be today, but the Romans really had the thought, the feeling, the living experience: Only he can be Consul whose senses are still open to receive what the gods wish to let flow into human evolution.

As the Republic went on and great discrepancies and quarrels arose, it was less and less possible to hold such sentiments, and this finally led to the end of the Roman Republic. The matter stood somewhat thus: People thought to themselves: if the Republic is said to have a significance in the world, the Consuls must be divinely inspired men, they must bring down what comes from the gods. But if one looks at the later Consuls of the Republic one can say to oneself: The gentlemen are no longer the proper instruments for the gods. And with this is linked the fact that it was no longer possible to have such a vital feeling for the significance of the Republic. The development of such a feeling lay of course behind men's ordinary consciousness. It lay very deep in the subconscious, and was only present in the consciousness of the so-called initiates. The initiates were fully cognisant of these things. Whoever therefore in the later Roman Republic was no ordinary materialistically thinking average citizen said to himself: 'Oh, this Consul, he doesn't please me—he's certainly not a divine instrument!' The initiate would never have admitted that, he would have said: He is, nevertheless, a divine instrument—Only ... with advancing evolution this divine inspiration could enter mankind less and less. Human evolution took on such a form that the divine could enter less and less, and so it came about that when an initiate, a real initiate appeared who saw through all this, he would have to say to himself: We cannot go on any further like this! We must now call upon another divine element which is more withdrawn from man. Men had developed outwardly, morally, etc., in such a way that one could no longer have confidence in those who were Consuls. One could not be sure that where the man's own development was in opposition to the divine, that the divine still entered. Hence the decision was reached to draw down, as it were, the instreaming of the divine into a sphere which was more withdrawn from men. Augustus, who was an initiate to a certain degree in these mysteries, was well aware of this. Therefore it was his endeavour to withdraw the divine world rulership from what men had hitherto, and to work in the direction of introducing the principle of heredity in the appointment to the office of Consul. He was anxious that the Consuls should no longer be chosen as they had been up to then, but that the office should be transmitted through the blood, so that what the Gods willed might be transmitted in this way. The continuance of the divine element in man was pressed down to a stage lying beneath the threshold of consciousness because men had reached a stage where they were no longer willing to accept the divine. You only arrive at a real understanding of this extraordinarily remarkable figure of Augustus, if you assume that he was fully conscious of these things, and that out of full consciousness, under the influence of the Athenian initiates in particular who came to him, he did all the things that are recorded of him. His limitation only lay in the fact that he could reach no understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha, that he only saw how human beings come down into matter, but could not conceive how the divine element should take anchor in the material of the blood. He had no understanding of the fact that something entirely new had now arisen in the Mystery of Golgotha. He was in a high sense an initiate of the old Mysteries, but he had no understanding for what was then emerging in the human race as a new element.

The point is, however, that what Augustus had accomplished was an impossibility. The divine cannot anchor in the pure material of the blood in earthly evolution, unless this earthly evolution is to fall into the Luciferic. Men would never be able to evolve if they could only do so as the blood willed, that is, developing from generation to generation what was already there before. However, something infinitely significant is connected with the accomplishment of this fact. You must remember that in early times when the ancient Mysteries were in force people possessed in the Mysteries a constant and powerfully active spiritual element, although that cannot be significant to us in the same way today. They knew, nevertheless, of the spiritual worlds; they came quite substantially into the human mind. And on the other hand people ceased in the time of Augustus to know anything of the spiritual element of the world; they no longer knew of it in consequence of man's necessary evolution. The Augustus-initiation actually consisted in his knowledge that men would become less and less fitted to take in the Spiritual element in the old way. There is an immense tragedy in what was taking place round the figure of Augustus. The ancient Mysteries were still in existence at that time, but the feeling continually arose: Something is not right in these ancient Mysteries. What was received from them was of immeasurable significance, a sublime spiritual knowledge. But it was also felt that something of immeasurable significance was approaching; the Mystery of Golgotha, which cannot be grasped with the old Mystery knowledge, with which the old Mystery knowledge was not in keeping. What could, however, be known to men through the Mystery of Golgotha itself was still very little. As a matter of fact even with our spiritual science we are today only at the beginning of understanding what has flowed into humanity with the Mystery of Golgotha. Thus there was something like a breaking away from the old elements, and we can understand that more and more there were men who said: We can do nothing with what comes to us from the Mystery of Golgotha. These were men who stood at a certain spiritual eminence in the old sense, the sense of the pre-Christian, the pre-Golgotha time.

Such men said to themselves: Yes, we have been told of one, Christus, who has spread certain teachings. They did not yet feel the deeper nature of these teachings, but what they heard of them seemed to be like warmed-up ancient wisdom. It was told them that some person had been condemned, had died on the cross, had taught this and that. This generally seemed to them false and deceptive, whereas the ancient wisdom which was handed down to them seemed enormously grand and splendid. Out of this atmosphere we can understand Julian the Apostate, whose entire mood can be understood in this way. More and more, individuals came forward who said: That which is given by the old wisdom, the way it explains the cosmos, cannot be united with that which blossoms, as if from a new centre, through the Mystery of Golgotha.—One of the individuals who felt this way was the sixth century Byzantine emperor Justinian (who lived from 527–565,¹ whose actions are to be understood from exactly this viewpoint. One must understand that he felt, through the whole manner in which he grew into his time, that something new was in the world ... at the same time there came into this new world that which was handed down from the old time. We will consider just three of these things which were thus handed down.

For a long time (five or six centuries) Rome had been ruled by emperors: The rank of consul, however, had existed for only a short time, and, like a shadow of the old times, these consuls were elected. If one looked at this election of consuls with the eyes of Justinian, one saw something which no longer made any sense, which had true meaning in the time of the Roman Republic, but was now without meaning: therefore he abolished the rank of consul. That was the first thing.

The second was that the Athenian-Greek schools were still in existence; in these was taught the old mystery-wisdom, which contained a much greater store of wisdom than that which was then being received under the influence of the Mystery of Golgotha. But this old mystery-wisdom contained nothing about the Mystery of Golgotha. For that reason Justinian closed the old Greek Philosophers' Schools.

Origenes, the Church Teacher, was well versed in what was connected with the Mystery of Golgotha, even though he still stood in the old wisdom, although not as strict initiate, yet as one having knowledge to a high degree. In his world-concept he had amalgamated the Christ-Event with the World-conception of the ancient, wisdom, he sought through this. to understand the Christ Event. That is just the interesting thing in the world concept of Origenes, that he was one of those who especially sought to grasp the Mystery of Golgotha in the sense of the old mystery wisdom. And the tragedy is that Origenes was condemned by the Catholic Church.

Augustus was the first stage. (see the lined diagram p.10a) Justinian in this sense was the second stage. Thus the earlier age is divided from the newer age, which- as regards the West—had no longer understanding for the Mystery wisdom. This wisdom had still lived on in the Grecian schools of philosophy, and had gradually to work towards the growth and prosperity of that current in mankind which proceeded from the Mystery of Golgotha. So it came about that the newer humanity, with the condemning of Origenes, with the closing of the Greek schools of philosophy, lost an infinite amount of the old spiritual treasure of wisdom. The later centuries of the Middle Ages worked for the most part with Aristotle, who sought to encompass the ancient wisdom through human intellect. Plato still received it from the ancient mysteries, Aristotle—he is, to be sure, infinitely deeper than modern philosophers—did not regard wisdom as a treasure of the Mysteries; he wished to grasp it with the human understanding. Thus what prevailed at that time in a noted degree was a thrusting back of the old Mystery Wisdom.

All this is connected with the perfecting in the new age of the condition which I described at the beginning of today's lecture. Had not the Grecian schools of philosophy been closed we should have possessed the living Plato, not that dead Plato whom the Renaissance produced, not the Platonism of modern times, which is a ghastly misconception of ^{1missing text}

• 1. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Justinian lived from 482–565, and ruled from 527–565.

My dear friends, yesterday we were able to show how the intellect, all that is connected with the forming of our ideas and concepts, is in a certain way—especially in the case of Western thinking—set free from the inner upstreaming, the inner creating, and activity. We saw how through this fact man comes to the point of merely seeing images of something external in what he receives as concepts and ideas, and how he does not notice that at the same time as he is conceiving and thinking, something is also happening in him himself. An inner becoming is accomplished, an inner happening takes place. And I also referred yesterday to the polar opposite of this, namely, how the impulses of feeling and will are bewitched in the inner being of man, so that when he feels, when he brings his will into activity, he has the consciousness that he is then entirely and solely within himself, that he is concerned only with himself, and that what takes place in the impulses of feeling and will has nothing to do with anything in the outside world, in the cosmos. We believe that in our feelings we only bring to expression our inner life, we believe we are experiencing something which is connected only with this inner nature.

I have pointed out that this originates from the fact that certain spiritual beings of the hierarchy of the Archangeloi, at the time of the separation of the Old Moon from the Sun-evolution, did not take the step of separation, but remained, as it were, with the progressing Sun-evolution. What entered their destiny through their not having made this step of sharing in the Moon existence, they are now going through, in as much as they take part in our earthly existence. They interpenetrate us, interweave in us and shut off our feeling and our willing from the outer cosmic existence. They confine this feeling and willing of ours to our inner nature.

But now there arises through this, as you can readily imagine, a kind of pronounced separation between something in us that wishes to be confined to us ourselves, to live only within us as our impulses of feeling and willing, and something else which pays little heed to what is in us, and which are, far more turns outwards and tries to take a direction towards the external.

If we want to make a sketch of what this denotes we could perhaps say:

If this is the human being drawn schematically, we should first be concerned with our intellectual life (Diagram 1 yellow) which turns to the outer world and wishes to receive it and pays no attention to the fact that here within, it is raying out and continually calling forth our form. On the other hand we have an element of will and feeling here in the interior (violet), they radiate only within us and we are not aware that they now also go out into the cosmos, that they really bear something in them which is just as much derived from the cosmos as is the content of our thoughts.

There is, however, in us human beings a connection between these two centres within us. It is a connecting link (light red) but in ordinary life and existence it remains unknown, does not enter the consciousness. Man, in fact, experiences as his inner world, his feeling-and willing, and as his outer world his thinking, which leads over to perceptions, to the sense impressions. Thus, in ordinary life, the link between these two centres in us does not actually come to our consciousness. As a consequence of this, man can easily acquire the notion that truth is imparted to him from two sides, that he attains truth, or something like truth by observing the outer world through his senses, and then combining the observation with his intellect and so on.

Kant has examined this process of observation of the outer world and of the production of certain spheres of ideation on the basis of those observations. In his researches he found nothing to which one could come if one extended what tries to go out in the cosmos from the one centre. He came to a point where he asserted: ‘Yes, that (Drawing 1, yellow) must certainly go out to a ‘thing in itself,’ but one cannot find it.’ On the other hand he felt how from the inner being of man something thrusts up which lives in willing and feeling. But since the connection remained unknown to him there were two worlds for him; the world of the existing order and the world of the moral order. He only felt one thing to be clear. ‘Here, one does not come to anything at all. The thing in itself is nebulous, is unknown; but that which thrusts up as it were against man gives a certain inner compulsion.’ This Kant called the ‘categorical imperative,’ from which he derived all truths related to the inner nature—as he calls them: all higher truths of belief in contrast to the external truths, which, however, can tell nothing of the actual world.

We must, however, give our chief attention to this: that as a matter of fact, not merely through his own disposition, but because of his whole evolution during the Saturn, Sun, and Moon conditions, man thus shared in the separation which occurred in the Moon-evolution, and has therefore come to this dual partition and must experience it as a natural condition.

Now when we consider these matters still more closely, we come to an important and significant truth which is given us by Spiritual Science, on the ground of what has here been characterised. We can say; this state of our thinking, our intellect and conceptual life, is connected with the former separation of the Moon from the progressing Sun. The way in which we, as human beings, apprehend our thinking and conceiving is connected with the fact that certain Luciferic beings of the hierarchy of the Angels who, through what they had become, did not share in the return of the Moon to the Sun—that those are now living in our intellect, so that something Luciferic lives in our intellect and shuts us off from looking into the inner moving and forming. Thus Lucifer, as it were, dwells in our thinking.

What now is the essential character of this Luciferic influence? The essential is that we do not perceive what was established in us and developed by the normally progressive divine-spiritual beings but we perceive instead what has been made out of this normal evolution by Lucifer. And what is it for Lucifer himself, that what he should have experienced during the Moon-evolution, but did not, he now carries into the Earth-evolution, and in this evolution experiences for his own part what in that earlier time he did not share? What will be the nature of that which he must undergo during the Earth-evolution? I beg you to pay great attention to this, for it is full of importance, even if difficult. So what does Lucifer want? What do these Luciferic angels that are in our intellect want?

At that time they did not want to take the step of the union of the moon with the sun. Had they done so, they would, as it were, have united conceiving and thinking in the right way with human nature. This they did not do, so now they contribute nothing to it.

Now, however, during Earth-existence, they wish to do what they did not do formerly; they now wish to bind the intellect with the human being; they wish to do during the Earth-evolution what they ought actually to have done during the Moon-evolution. When you consider this earnestly you will understand that something of immense significance follows from it.

Had we not been misled by Luciferic beings in the way referred to, we should not relate thinking to ourselves as we do now, but we should look back to the Moon-evolution and say: ‘Long ages ago our thinking wished to unite with our inner being, wanted to belong to us.’ This we do not say, but instead: ‘We appropriate the thoughts of the world and now receive them within us.’ But that is sheer Luciferic temptation in the sense of the divine spiritual beings we should think: out there is extended the world of the senses as we see it; the moment we now pass over to thinking, we look back to the Old Moon-existence and attribute the whole earthly sense world to it.

The following is what we should experience: If we call that (see diagram) e earthly-perceived-sense world, we should then have the in us, i.e., the earth- contents, and we should not, as we do now, form concepts of the Earth-content, but we should say instead; All that we have in this way as earth-content, we relate to the ancient Moon,—and while we have sense-perceptions and the surroundings of earth appear to the senses there lights up in us the realisation that everything that lives and weaves upon earth, everything that exists and works and grows, appears upon the foundation of the old Moon existence.

There would light up something like a connection with a star apparently belonging to the past, but which was still there, living in our world of thought. We should feel in connection with the past existing in the present, and should see through the Luciferic deceptive picture which consists in this—that Lucifer holds before the shining Moon-existence a curtain, a veil, because at that time he omitted to unite himself with the Sun-existence. And he deceives us and makes us believe that what we ought to look upon as lighting up in us from the Old Moon-existence—that is from the eternally new Moon-existence is our thought-content, which is firmly established in us through our brain and rests within us as earthly men.

So through what has happened we have been shut off from that wonderful and mighty memory of the Old Moon. We do not see continually in the background, shining, as it were, into the nape of our neck, the explanation of all that the senses conjure up before us. We ought to go through the world, our senses turned outwards to sense-existence, and ought to feel as though our neck and the back of our head were shone upon by the ancient Sun and Moon-existence. And this would proffer the explanation of real, living concepts, concepts which are cosmic, and do not work into us from the external earthly objects.

Thus two world-pictures are projected through one another; the Earth-picture and the Moon-Picture. We ought to be able to hold them apart; the one, inasmuch as we turn our senses outwards, the other, inasmuch as we receive the shining from behind, and we ought to prevent their weaving into each other in our intellect. We cannot do this. Lucifer confuses the one with the other. Ideas, concepts, sense impressions, he mixes together, and philosophers have for a long time endeavoured to crack open a beautiful problem, which they call ‘antimony.’

You can refer to Kant: There on the one page you always have proofs brought forward, for instance, that the world is infinite as regards space; on the other page you have just as strict proofs advanced, that the world is not spatially infinite but is limited. For both there are equally conclusive proofs. They must be there, because the one point of view is just as true as the other, only one is the earth -view and the other the moon-view. To one who cannot hold them apart, they become insoluble contradictions, contradictions which cannot be solved in any case with earthly understanding. But we have seen that a still older kind of deviation from the forward course of evolution was that brought about by the spirits from the hierarchy of Archangeloi who live in our impulses of feeling and will. Therefore we can say: Lucifer through his existence shuts us off from the cosmos; he only allows us to feel the impulses of feeling and will which live in our inner nature. If he were not to shut us off like this, then, instead of feeling that will impulses and feeling arise as though from the subconscious inner being, man would be aware of all that shines into him, illumines him from the cosmos through the Sun-evolution. As man ought to be aware in his intellect of the Old Moon behind the ordinary sense-existence, so he ought to see behind his impulses of feeling and willing the radiating cosmic sun arise. In feeling and willing he should see—as the kernel in the fruit-the essence of the Sun shining through.

But we are shut off from this through Lucifer. We think that feeling and will are only something within us, we do not realise that they contain within them living sun-forces, sun-forces that are actually within them. If we were to feel these sun-forces, were we really to feel the spirit-light shining within feeling and will; then we should have an insight into the cosmos precisely through this lighting up of the spirit-light of the world. We should have a direct vision of the external through our inner nature. That has been destroyed for us through those Luciferic spirits who have an archangel nature and who did not share in the step of the separation of the Moon from the Sun. It had to be brought to us again through the coming of this cosmic sun-nature into the evolution of mankind. This cosmic Sun-nature came into earthly evolution through the Mystery of Golgotha, that Mystery, the entire reality of which man must first of all accept in himself, must inwardly experience :Not I, but Christ in me.

And proceeding thence, more and more that inwardly shining, shaping force is formed in him. Cosmic light penetrates feeling and willing like the sunlight and unites itself with the intellectual life so that we attain a uniform cosmic picture by learning to allow the Christ-impulse to live, not only in feeling and willing, but to let it flow into the world of our concepts and understanding. Thus, instead of merely looking to Christ Jesus, a whole cosmology is really born for us, a Christened cosmology. We come to learn what the cosmos was before the Mystery of Golgotha, when the Christ was united with the Sun-nature outside the earth realm, and what the cosmos is after the Mystery of Golgotha, when the Christ is now no longer separated from the earthly aura, but lives on further within the aura of the earth. Only through first feeling ourselves to be identified with the Christ-impulse, regarding, as it were, this Christ-impulse as the centre from which, as shown yesterday, we can receive the continuous, the eternal, ever-enduring revelation,—only through this do we press forward increasingly to the possibility of attaining to a concrete Christianity, full of content, which will then be completely one with the content of spiritual science, even as regards cosmology.

Take the whole nerve- let me say -of Christology,—take what a man must really understand to comprehend Christology. Why do so many people not understand it? Why do they connect no right ideas with the Mystery of Golgotha? Because it is asking too much of them to describe as reality something which they are not otherwise accustomed to call real.

A sentence is to be found in a book of Haeckel's which reads something like this: ‘The Immaculate Conception is an impudent mockery of human reason.’ But why of human reason? Well, the next sentence reads: because in all other cases, in the animal and human kingdoms, it is not possible to observe such a birth. That is obviously a logical contradiction in itself.. For one ought to bring forward ground based not on observation but on reason. But just here again we encounter a fact of such a nature that it is incompatible with the ideas which man receives from external reality. All that man otherwise calls ‘real’ is incompatible, with the reality of this fact, with the whole fact of the Mystery of Golgotha.

Thus a man must grasp something that contradicts his ideas of reality. Now to those who approach more closely to Spiritual Science a way should open to ideas which permit an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. You see, in ordinary life and also in modern science what one observes with the outer senses is called real, or at least, something that is founded on reality. Real science rests upon what one observes by means of the senses. People endeavour, however, to make use of the senses for other purposes, they try to grasp everything after the manner of sense observation of external things. Biologists try to grasp the living being, the living organism as though it were only a complicated cooperation of purely mechanical forces, a complicated machine, since it is only a complicated machine that they can actually regard as a reality.

What actually lies behind this? What lies behind it is the fact that men call something real,—and indeed nowadays, throughout the whole of their life—which is not real at all, which is not in the least what it is said to be. Consider a corpse. Can you say that this corpse is the man? No, this disintegrating corpse is not the man, it is the form of man which is breaking in pieces. And so it is with the whole of outer nature. People investigate the inanimate, and have no idea that everything which is inanimate has once been alive. Men must find the transition from the concept of ‘inanimate nature’ to the concept of ‘Nature that has died,’ men must really grasp the fact that all inanimate things were once living and have died, that what we can find today as stone and rock was alive during the Moon age and has died, has become lifeless stone through a process such as that passed through by the human corpse.

If we were to grasp this actively, and look upon Nature as a corpse, then we should know that what we call existence is not something that contains existence, but rather something out of which existence has already fled. This is of infinite importance. Men do not realise that they cling to the inanimate, not realising that it is something that has died, and that they are trying to learn to understand the living through what has died.

When men look at the living organism that has not yet died, but lives before their eyes, and reduce it to a mechanism which is only an image of the dead, they are trying to understand and explain the living from the dead. That is the ideal and goal of the whole modern world concepts: to grasp the living out of what has died. Spiritual Science must take pains, always take pains to replace an understanding through the dead by an understanding through the living. The whole trend of modern science must disappear, since its only aim is to grasp the living through that which has died, not merely through the inanimate, the inorganic, but through what has died. This whole science must disappear. In its place must arise an understanding of the world out of the living. And of all the non-living, the inorganic at the present time, it must be realised that in the past it too was a living being. Had we not been luciferically hindered, from perceiving behind the sense impressions what has been characterised as the Moon existence, which stands behind them,—then we should realises there lies the corpse of what still appears to us from the Old-Moon. Just as on seeing a human corpse we remember how the man appeared as he was in life, how he went about and spoke with us, so, on looking at the earth we should look back on what it was when it was still alive during the Old-Moon existence.

It must be the earnest endeavour of Spiritual Science that we should be led out of the dead into the living; that must be an active, true goal although it may be difficult to attain; for all that is contained in our modern science touching a conception of the world is thoroughly foreign and hostile to such an aim. We must not deceive ourselves about this, but be quite clear that the world conception of modern science is absolutely opposed to it.

It will be intensely difficult to gain a living grasp of the cosmos in place of the dead one. But when we hold living ideas, then we shall no longer be wanting in an understanding of the Mystery of Golgotha. For we shall know that what, in general, is subject to death, is derived from the Moon-existence, but that the Christ is from the Sun-existence. He held back in order to bring to us the Sun-element again. He has nothing to do with all the concepts that are lifeless, but will replace them by living ones. Therefore it is necessary to unite with Him in a living way, not through a dead science. Therefore it is necessary to recognise that only under specially abnormal conditions, could that which cannot die, cannot become dead, enter into the earthly course.

When one studies the special connection which the Christ Being had during the three years with the body of Jesus of Nazareth, one comes to realise that actually, in the different members which were united through the inter-connection of the two Jesus boys, through the fact that Zarathustra lived in the Nathan Jesus, something entirely special was created (I have already referred to this in other lectures), something which, during those three years made this whole body different from an ordinary human body. An ordinary human body is actually not the same as this body was already—and through the particular kind of union throughout the three years with the Zarathustra-being still- remained different from other earthly bodies. As the earth began to recapitulate the Moon-existence, there remained behind, as I have explained, that essential substance which then appeared in the Luke Jesus, the Nathan Jesus boy; something which had not entered into death, or passed through the illusion of earthly death, which in the course of earthly phenomena was reserved for Christ Jesus, this held back. This was in Christ Jesus, and guided him through these three years and through death,—through the Maya of death, in a different way from other human beings.

This extraordinarily central phenomenon of earthly evolution must, however be understood, must be really grasped, as standing outside everything that is derived solely from the Moon-existence, it must be understood as being inwardly connected with the regularly progressive Sun-existence. Nor, therefore, after the Mystery of Golgotha had been accomplished, could this Christ-Being be dependent on anything which is derived, only from the Moon-existence, derived, that is, from a Moon which had separated from the Sun, when during this separation Luciferic beings had taken part in the splitting off, but not in the reunion.

The Christ-Being remains completely untouched by all that is in the earth through this aberration from Luciferic spirits. He would immediately have been affected by it had He been incorporated in an ordinary human body. Hence He could only appear physically upon earth through these special and abnormal occurrences, not covered by earthly laws. And since this Being had taken possession of an earthly body through the Mystery of Golgotha, He is now upon earth spiritually and not subject to those laws which came into earth-existence through the Moon evolution. These are the laws of Space and Time.

Space and Time ... I have already indicated in Occult Science (as you will find in the passages there) that it is difficult to form a picture of the ancient Saturn and Sun conditions, because one must leave out the concepts of space and time. What one pictures as space and time in regard to this ancient existence, is only an analogy, only an image, does not as yet correspond with reality. The concepts of space and time have no reality if applied earlier than the Moon-existence. One cannot use this concept for the previous conditions of evolution. But that which comes through the Christ into the spatial-temporal is likewise not bound up with the laws of space and time. Therefore a genuine Spiritual Science recognises it as the greatest imaginable error to suppose that the Christ, as He is united now with earth-existence, could appear before mankind spatially limited in one single human being. It would be the gravest misapprehension of the Christ to assert that there could be a re-embodiment of Christ at the present day, and that if He perhaps wished to speak in the future to—let us say—a person in Europe and then to someone in America, He would have to take train and steamer and thus travel from Europe to America. That will never happen. He will always be raised above the laws of space and time. And we must conceive of His appearance in the 20th century as being raised above these laws. Never could the Christ, rightly understood, be embodied in a single human being.

It would therefore be or rather it is a blow in the face of genuine Spiritual Science, wherever it is asserted that there could ever be a human re-embodiment of Christ Jesus.¹ But with this, it is also shown that Christology, that which the Christ really is, has nothing to do with any divisions of man and mankind.

We see there, my dear friends, a way open: how the cosmic, the sun-nature comes again into our whole human race, how again the sun-nature, lost through Lucifer, rises in our feeling and willing, how it rises again through the Christ in our feeling and will how from there it can take hold of our intellect. That is the way which all spiritual understanding of the world must take in the future. But for a long time there will be errors and mistaken paths; for—I have often stressed it—only slowly and gradually can the Mystery of Golgotha in its depths find its way into the whole course of humanity's evolution. Only quite slowly and gradually can that come about. And inasmuch as it is gradually accomplished, more and more, it will create an accord between man's, intellectuality and his feeling and willing. That will increasingly fill out the human being with an inner Man, with a second man.

In man as he is without this filling out through the Christ Impulse, the head&'s inner nature, one might say, is hidden. If a man feels his head, he has headache; the inner quality is physically completely veiled as regards the head. Man carries the head about with him in normal life without actually feeling it, he makes use of it for registering external impressions.

The other part of man, which is at the same time the seat of the world of lower desires, this is within us; this to begin with, takes up nothing from outside, lives in itself. And the Jahve-God has concealed in a world of law not entering human consciousness, all that lives down below, as the sum total of man's desire world, so that the Luciferic rumblings or egotism, do not become too great. Through Lucifer we should really only be organised as Earthly men, to use our lower nature—disregarding the intellect -solely and only for ourselves. We should develop not a single altruistic instinct but purely egoistic instincts. There would be in the world no natural foundation for love. The human being would merely use the instincts that live in his lower nature, for manifesting himself in the world, for putting himself into the picture. Hence this lower nature has been rendered dim and dulled by the Jahve Godhead.

The Jahve Godhead himself lives in this lower nature and implants the instinct of love and altruism, but of a kind more or less unconscious for ordinary human life. These instincts and impulses have to become conscious again through the Impulse of the Mystery of Golgotha. But in this whole unconsciousness of the desire world something of a twofold nature lies concealed. In the first place, the connection of the intellect, of the conceptual with the desire world remains in the subconscious. But nevertheless it works upwards, works definitely upwards and it works upwards through the fact that something enters which I have already often explained.

This whole desire world, which is actually an egotistic world belonging only to the human being, can, as it were emancipate itself from the Jahve Godhead living in it. Then it works upward, but—unconsciously and without man's knowledge—it presses through and interpenetrates the conceptual world with its imaginations. Then man becomes clairvoyant, that is to say, he his visions. He experiences as Imaginations all that lives in his desire world. In reality he only experiences his desire world; it shows itself to him as the Imaginative world. But since in this whole desire world of ours only the cosmos lives—though veiled from man—the Imaginations which rise up from his desire world like a mirage conjure up for him a complete cosmos. He can now experience a whole Cosmos, which Consists of nothing but that down below where the fire of the lower desires burns. This fire of the lower instincts then shoots upwards, and now a cosmos arises, here above in the intellectual system. This is essentially the process of self- mediumship. The medium who becomes a medium through his own desires and instincts succumbs to these processes. Such mediums are usually very proud of their Imaginations. They look down with arrogance upon those people who have no Imagination, whereas those in their turn can often very well see that such Imaginations, as are from time to time described as marvellous pictures are nothing more than what boils and bubbles in the instincts and in the digestive processes and loses its way upwards as cosmic images. It rises as a mist into the world of concepts and takes on the form of false cosmic pictures, expressing itself through these.

But the effect of this duality of human nature can appear in yet another way. For let us suppose that a second man meets the first man, a second who is naturally, as human being so constituted that his inner nature of willing and feeling hides the cosmos, and his intellectuality hides his own inner self. (Diagram II. Man) (Pg. 17)

Now let us suppose that such a second man, by means of various processes of which we have still to speak, came to the point of having more or less consciousness. Thus here would be man #1 and man # 2 (Pg 17) had reached a consciousness of this relation (Diagram II, Light red).

Now let us suppose that this man (II) was not disposed to employ all that came to him through such a consciousness in the pure sense of a universal and Christianized spiritual science, but that he had his own particular aims in the world. Let us suppose that this man belonged to a region which had framed a special world-concept in the course of historical development, and he had grown up within this region with such a world conception; and let us suppose that he had special, egoistic grounds to impose it upon the world quite intensively. The true occultist as we know has no other desire than to make valid that which can benefit all men; he has no lust of domination; but let us suppose that such a man II had a desire of power, and wished to make the world-conception of a limited territory dominate in other territories. Now if he simply goes ahead and represents in his own way the world concept that he wished to make dominant the following will happen: Some will believe him others will not believe him. Those who are of different opinion will not believe him, will repulse him- we know from experience how European missionaries are often repulsed by other races if they say things that these people do not understand or have no intention of understanding—another way. Since this whole process is a conscious one, he has the power of working upon another person e.g., upon Man #1 (Diagram Pg 2) and if he does not work merely through his intellect, but through his whole personality, he can act upon the intellect of the other.

Now if the other man is so organized that he has mediumistic tendencies—i.e., can receive something in an abnormal way—and so simply accepts it as truth because it is advanced by the second then there streams from the second into the first man the world concept held by the second, and the first allows it to pass through his unspoiled intellect if then the former appears before mankind, what is now presented comes out in quite a different way. People would notice in the case of man # 2 that acts purely on his own behalf in the world, and he has the power of clothing in an intellectual system what arises out of his inner being, for what he gives out is his own position. The ego of man #1 has not got it as its own possession but takes it from the other as something objective and advocates it with his intellect in such a way—since it is not his own personally—as to give it a more universal character. It seems to come from the unspoiled intellect of man #1 as if it were a universal truth. Here you have the facts as to how, from a certain grey or black direction, one-sided information is carried into the world. The particular one-sided grey or black spiritual-scientists do not bring it to the world by standing up and presenting their views, but they pour them into a mediumistic person. This person takes them over, passes them on and lets them work upon other people through their intellect. Hence such grey or black spiritual scientists often remain in the background as Mahatmas, and those who stand before the world speak of the Mahatma standing behind them, and what they proclaim is given out as a communication of the Mahatma.

This phenomenon leads up to much that has happened in a terribly psychologically-tragic way, one night call it, in the case of poor H.P. Blavatsky, who in the most eminent sense of the word, was a mediumistic personality. Her intellect was, however, never adequate to examine what was passed over to her by people who were not always honourable, but who could work precisely through Madame-Blavatsky. These persons concocted things which were not always irreproachable; in an egoistic sense and through the mediumistic intellect of Blavatsky they made this into something which then worked on people in a suggestive way. To those, however, who wish to take their stand honourably on the ground of spiritual science, quite definite rules and regulations of conduct are inseparable from it.

You see, from all that has now been expounded, that under all circumstances, when it is a question of spreading spiritual science, one sentence must hold good. It is obvious that anything coming from some kind of mediumism is interesting and significant, for it comes, of course, out of another world, but it must never be taken just as it stands. Otherwise it will fare with humanity as it did in the whole development of spiritism in the second half of the 19th century.

The whole development of the movement in the second half of the 19th century was really undertaken from a certain side in order to test men and ascertain how ripe they were to recognize not only the material sense world which men perceive with their senses lives around them, but also a spiritual world; for the modern material world concept of the 19th century had, under Ahrimanic suggestion, brought wide-spread belief in the sense word as the only existence. Already in the middle of the 19th century, it was a great question among occultists as to whether they should oppose this whole spiritistic movement. It was decided at the time not to not to oppose it, for it was assumed—though this was short-sighted—that when men saw how all sorts of things came from the spiritual world through the medium, they would most certainly bethink themselves that there were actually things and forces in the world which worked from one to another in a spiritual way. Instead of this the whole spiritistic movement plunged into a very egoistic materialistic channel. The majority of mediums everywhere said that they were in contact with this or that deceased person. They brought to light all sorts of things inasmuch as they said: this or that soul who died here or there communicated one thing or another through the medium. To be sure they brought to light very many things. But in far the greater number of cases a colossal error lay at the root of their claims. For if we imagine here the medium as Man 1, we have to imagine the experimenter or hypnotizer, i.e., the one who arranged everything, as Man 2.

[IMAGE REMOVED FROM PREVIEW]

Now in every man whilst he is alive here, all that is his dead part is already in him. But that reverberates below; during the waking day life it reverberates below in the sense perceptions. The dead part of man rumbles below in the sense perceptions. Now imagine the following: The medium is there, the experimenter also is there; he passes over to the medium or to whatever else may be manifesting in the arrangements, that which is actually pulsating in his own sense impressions, and often in his lower instincts and will reappear one day when he himself dies. Truths may be contained in all this, but one must understand the whole nature of what arises; one must not listen to the medium when he asserts that what comes to him by revelation is a communication from the departed.

The people who did not immediately offer resistance to spiritism, said to themselves: what it is will soon be evident. They wanted to know whether the working upon the medium of the living, of what lives in the embodied person, was really furthered. The mediums completely misunderstood this, always believing that they stood in connection with the departed. So we see how mediumism certainly formed a connection with the other world, though a deceptive one. Lucifer is not somehow driven away from the path of normality to mediumism but he is drawn in still more, the deception becomes still greater. What is in the inner being is not set free and distributed in the cosmos, but what is within spreads out like a mist in the conceptual world and becomes an imaginative world. What is in man's inner being can proceed from himself or rise up within him through the influence of another person.

But out of this will follow an infinitely significant and important law for the spread of spiritually scientific truth and for work in the stream of spiritual science. One should take care that all direct belief in a man's authority must be the less, the more this person shows marks and traces of mediumship. The more such a person comes and says; ‘I have received this or that as an impression somewhere or other,’ yet is not fully conscious of this and cannot furnish proof, all the less is there authority in his mediumship.

Therefore when H.P. Blavatsky brought certain teachings into the world, one had of necessity to say: This personality shows strong evidences of mediumship, and so it is impossible to credit her with authority, or at least only in a very slight degree. Authority must dwindle in proportion as the person shows traces of mediumship.

In the same way, it is an axiom, so to speak, in the spreading of the truths of spiritual science, that in this spreading there must never be any kind of appeal, when the truths are made public, to unnamed Masters or Mahatmas. No matter how many unnamed Beings and personalities stand behind such a movement, that which has significance as proceeding from such Beings is only significant for the one who directly confronts them; it is his affair whether he believes in them or not, and whether he can prove that they are worthy of trust. But it can never be his business when he is making public statements to claim that he has had it from unnamed Masters or Mahatmas, (in a small circle, if someone simply says... ‘This or that was said to me and I believe it,’ that is different, those are things that pass from one personality to another). The moment, however, that it becomes a question of presenting a teaching to the world, then the one who represents it must himself accept the responsibility for it. And only he who makes it clear though the type of man he is, that he does not appeal to unreal or unknown Mahatmas when he wishes to substantiate what he is propagating but who rather makes it intelligible and obvious that he, as personality, standing there on the physical plane, takes complete responsibility for his teaching, only he is living up to his full duty. And one who cannot do this, can refer to someone to be found by name on the physical plane, or who, if he is dead, can be found among the dead by historical paths.

It is therefore most important for the transmission of teachings that the one who communicates them with his own personality, as he stands there in the physical world, should accept full responsibility for the teachings, and must not appeal to unknown Masters. And those who spread the teachings further, may also only appeal to living personalities, who as physical persons are prepared to take full responsibility for their teachings. This gives a sure and certain way for dissemination of the teaching to a wider circle, but gate and door are barred against all persons unnamed and to all hints and allusions. Whoever asserts that he has received this or that from here or there, from unknown masters or from the dead (through which one can so regale oneself on one's own arrogance) against him is door and gate locked. For in spreading spiritual science the question is to know the path taken by the threads of confidence which lead to its original sources.

Hence, it was wrong when, in the so-called Theosophical Society one began to found certain society procedures on the utterances of unknown Mahatmas. That ought never to have been done. For anything that takes place and is propagated on the physical plane, a physical personality is answerable, as much as when teachings are circulated. He who spreads the teachings of another, has equally to show that he appeals, not to some unknown powers or impulses found along mediumistic paths, but to historical or living personalities. This means that he appeals to those who show the whole method of entry of spiritual truth into the physical world, who moreover, take full responsibility for their teachings and also show through their conduct that they take that responsibility. That is it above all! It is this latter above all!

These are two very important rules. The first is that we must possess the feeling that authority vanishes, if mediumism arises in the communication of the statements of personalities, and the second is that responsibility is never laid upon beings who are introduced to the world as unknown. One can, of course, speak of such unknown beings, but one must not appeal to them as authorities. That is a very different matter.

I only wished to place these indications before you today, since it is important to have the right feeling as to how the whole spirit and nature of the strivings of spiritual science should live in us. We must stand within this movement in the right way, otherwise the spiritual science movement will be immeasurably injured by being mixed up with unclear, mediumistic things, with appeals and references to all sorts of Mahatmas and beings who stand behind it. Everything that those standing in the movement so much enjoy shrouding in the magic breath of mystery (although it really proceeds from sense-instincts)—all this must be gradually ejected, otherwise we shall really not make progress in the sphere of spiritual science.

If every impact of a disordered gastric juice with the walls of the stomach causes an impetus that arises as a mist into the intellect and manifests there in the form of an Angel-Imagination, and the person in question then tells his fellow-men about this angel, that can of course make a very fine story! But what is instigated through this sort of thing only causes injury to the spiritual-scientific movement, endless injury. For the important part about these things is that they not only cause injury through what is said, but also through what they are—for they are, in fact, realities. The moment that one puts a false garment on them, one makes them appear before the world in a false form.

Obviously no one would make a special impression if he were to say: ‘I have had something going wrong in the stomach. The action of my gastric juices upon the stomach walls has appeared to me as an Angel.’ Anyone speaking thus would make no particular impression on his fellow-men; if, however, he were to leave out the first part, he would make a strong impression. It is extraordinarily important for people to have a thorough knowledge that this can happen. Naturally one cannot distinguish straight away between a true Imagination and a false one; but neither is it necessary to bring one's Imaginations immediately to people's notice. All that must be taken thoroughly into account. It is necessary, really earnestly necessary, to consider how the spreading of the spiritual science outlook can best take place in the world. We have had, up to now the instrument of the Society, no doubt too, in the future of our Anthroposophical Society we shall have it. But we must really so conceive of this Anthroposophical Society—or speaking more loosely—of our standing within the movement of Spiritual Science, that we shall consider in what way it is an instrument for something that is to take place spiritually in the whole earthly evolution.

You see, my dear friends, it happens all too often that one may become a member of the Anthroposophical Society, and yet carry into that Society all the various habits, inclinations, sympathies and antipathies that one had before becoming a member, and continue to exercise them. It is necessary to think this over. I have therefore today made the subject of our studies something that closely concerns us and that is real—and that is: how it is possible for imposters to appear who want to make propaganda for some one-sided world concept and make use of a mediumistic personality in order to introduce this one-sided world concept to the world. Just as the one who appeared in the place of the Master Kut-Humi stood there as an imposter and implanted a one-sided world concept in Blavatsky, so also was it possible for people not to see that behind her stood a grey magician who was in the pay of a narrowly circumscribed human society, and wished to promulgate a definite human world conception.

This is something very, very real, and shows us how keenly we must be on the watch when it is a matter of fostering and cultivating this sublime treasure of spiritual science, so necessary to mankind. One must strive for honesty—really into the inmost fibres of feeling; naturally faults may arise—but one must strive for the purest integrity. One must not, through laziness, be quickly satisfied that one can believe in anyone who gives one something of value, but must test every step, prove whatever comes to light. That is absolutely essential. It is a reality, not a mere theory, that steams into mankind in this spiritual science. Human evolution receives something actual and real through what steams into mankind through the world concept of Spiritual Science.

We must therefore become conscious that we must take a different stand on earth from that otherwise taken when we do not ally ourselves to such a Spiritual-Science stream.

• 1. This had to be especially emphasised in view of the propaganda of ‘The Star in the East.’

Ladies and gentlemen! From the viewpoints the Waldorf School takes as its points of departure, there is not one path but many that lead away from the unnatural things that have been imposed on humanity, and especially on our public life, toward something natural that is being demanded by human nature in its broadest sense, so to speak. I intend to outline one such path, the path between the teacher and the parents” house, in the remarks I am going to present to you today.

You may say that this path can be taken for granted, and yet, ladies and gentlemen, not only has the path teachers and educators take to the parents” house been found to be very difficult at times, but there are many, many significant views on education that pay no attention to it at all. I need only remind you of something that was experienced as a great event in the course of German cultural development—the appearance of Johann Gottlieb Fichte in all fields. Today, however, we will only mention his appearance in the field of education. During one of the most difficult times in German history, he gave his penetrating “Speeches to the German Nation” in which he pointed out that healing and re-enlivening German life after the humiliation of 1806 would have to happen through education.¹ We can say that Johann Gottlieb Fichte, one of the noblest of all Germans, found the most beautiful and most significant words to say about education. However, he regarded it as a fundamental prerequisite for carrying out his pedagogical intentions that children be taken from their parents homes and cooped up together in special educational institutions that would be run according to strict principles and only by a unified state. After his time, we also witnessed a great variety of educational experiments in which children from certain circumstances were brought together in special places to be educated appropriately. In the course of humanity’s evolution we have seen numerous examples that necessitated the removal of children from their homes.

Although Waldorf education and its spirit work with at least as much urgency and at least as much out-of-the-depths of the human soul as the educational experiments sketched briefly above, this spirit of Waldorf education took a very different direction from the very beginning. It did not take superficialities as its starting point. It did not say that this or that social provision had to be made for the sake of the children. It did not say that children needed to be removed from their normal situations and placed in different ones. From the very beginning the spirit of Waldorf education was a purely pedagogical and methodological one. The social situation and the circumstances of the children’s lives are accepted for what they are, and everything that is to be accomplished through Waldorf education is striven for on the basis of the inner spiritual foundations of pedagogy itself. We can thus say, in effect, that wherever educational difficulties arise because of a childs social situation or other circumstances, these are accepted as destiny by the spirit of Waldorf education, and methods are put into effect that will allow the difficulties to be overcome out of the spirit and out of teaching practices that are individualized for the child in question to the greatest possible extent. This means, however, that a school like the Waldorf School stands in the midst of actual life. In actual life, if we are dealing with a school that takes children at age six or seven, they are coming from home, and since we have no boarding facility they remain at home and in the care of their parents during the time when they are not in school. Thus the entire thrust of education in the Waldorf School is to work together with the parents. In particular, as we shall see, we must feel, sense, and think together with the parents.

No doubt many of you have often been presented with the idea of the significance of the stages of life for the life of a child.

There are two or three of life’s stages that are of concern to our theory of education. The first begins at birth and ends at the change of teeth, the second begins at the change of teeth and ends at puberty, and the third continues from there until approximately the twenty-first year of life. If we have an unprejudiced sense of how things are, each of these stages in the life of a child shows us the child in a totally different constitution of soul and of body. Let us first consider the child’s soul constitution.

Until the change of teeth, the child is definitely dependent on imitation for learning what is taught. What you demonstrate to the child works like an outer stimulus that calls upon the child’s entire bodily organization—in some places more visibly, in others less visibly—to imitate the impression. To substantiate this, we need only keep in mind the decisive fact that children acquire their native language wholly through imitation, which works deeply into the organization of their bodies and souls. We must take into account that the vibration, the waves of movement, of any spoken sound is experienced much more intensely in childhood than it is later on in life. Even in speaking, when it is a person’s native language that is in question, any adjusting of the larynx, any inner ensouling of the organs, is based on imitation. This is how it is with everything in the child’s life until the change of teeth.

Nowadays, when a misunderstanding, or rather numerous misunderstandings, generate great errors in our otherwise so admirable scientific world-view, we often talk about the hereditary basis of one or the other thing a child acquires in the first stage of life up to the change of teeth. But as far as the child is concerned, the only basis for this talk of heredity is the fact that the people who are talking about it have no real sense of observation. Otherwise they would find out that basically much of what we attribute today to this dark and mysterious heredity must actually be looked for in the child’s clearly comprehensible tendency to imitate.

However, consider how close the child’s soul life, which arises out of this imitative activity, is to the life of the parents simply because the child is a being who imitates. If we really grasp how strong the tendency toward imitation is in the child, we come to have a holy awe and a profound respect for the child/parent relationship. And if we then look at the basis for all this in spiritual cosmic connections, then we are truly able to say that since a human being is a spiritual being prior to embarking on a physical existence, this person—in spite of being a free being—enters earthly existence with a very specific destiny with regard to the forms, if not the routines, of life. If we look on the one hand at how this destiny unrolls with an inner regularity from the smallest experiences of childhood to a ripe old age, and on the other hand at how the child grows close to the parents by being an imitative being, if we really see all this in the context of all the underlying spiritual connections, we begin to have sensations that are religious in character, you might say, about what is given to us as teachers and educators when a child is entrusted to us. And these almost religious sensations make us strongly inclined to want to understand, when a child is entrusted to us on entering school, precisely how this child is connected to his or her parents.

It may be said that theoretical pedagogical considerations or abstract principles are truly not what determine how the spirit of Waldorf education sets out to meet the parents of the children. Rather, it is something living, just as everything else in the Waldorf school is meant to be something living. It is a living thing; it is the Waldorf teacher’s active need to be able not only to approach the child in spirit but also to find a way from the child to the parents through every expression of soul the child presents, through every motivating force, through every type of childish impulsiveness, and even through every gesture and every hand movement. This confirms our understanding of the child, which we Waldorf teachers need above all else if we are to teach by deriving our educational impulses from the very nature of the child in question. First and foremost, we can confirm that we are looking at a child in the right way by turning to the parents standing behind him or her. This is the case even when the parent/child relationship is not absolutely harmonious. In actual life what grows out of children and parents living together can manifest in the greatest possible variety of ways. Of course we have an inner feeling of happiness when we look at the destiny of a child who has the possibility of living in fully harmonious circumstances with exemplary parents. But may we not pose a counterquestion to this? If we observe life, either contemporary or historical life, without bias, do we not find that the greatest spirits, not only intellectual geniuses but also geniuses of virtue and moral action, have often sprung from grave disharmonies between child and parents? Waldorf teachers must acquire the habit of not criticizing the child/parent relationship, but of accepting it objectively, because their acquaintance with the parents can shed light on the child’s idiosyncrasies.

Thus it is not some pedagogical principle that challenges the Waldorf teacher to find a way to get to know the parents, but rather an inner heartfelt need, just as Waldorf education in general is essentially a pedagogy of the heart.

Let us now look at something else, namely the fact that teachers are now obliged to take on part of what used to be provided solely by the parents of children of elementary-school age. On entering elementary school, a child is going through the change of teeth. Nowadays children are sent to school somewhat too early; elementary-school age actually only begins with the change of teeth, but that is not the main point here.

When a child is sent to school and entrusted to a teacher, the teacher must take on a part of education or child-rearing that acquires its specific character from the fact that the child’s entire soul life, the child’s entire constitution of soul and spirit, is also transformed at the change of teeth. After that, the child is no longer an imitative being, although the principle of imitation does persist for several years into the child’s time in elementary school. Fundamentally, however, the child is now no longer an imitative being, but a being who is stimulated by what it meets in the form of images, through our structuring what we present in an appropriate and artistic way, you might say. At this age, children no longer tend to apply themselves imitatively and with their entire constitution to what is presented to them. Instead, they shift to the principle of natural authority. Whereas earlier it was the children’s will that imitatively traced what was demonstrated to them in their entire constitution, now it is their feeling that likes or dislikes what their teacher presents to them in images, including the images of his or her entire personality and actions, of the composition of his or her speech, and so forth. And the authority that prevails in school between the change of teeth and puberty must not be arbitrarily imposed. It must be a matter of course. Without admitting this, it is impossible to look at how human life unfolds as a whole. It is so easy to say that we should always use visual aids in our lessons. I do not mean to say anything against visual aids, but they should not become a means of trivializing instruction. We cannot take it as a principle to reduce everything to the level the children are already on. The point is that only those things that directly nurture the children through visualization need to be cloaked in a visual representation. But take a circumstance from religious or moral life—how are we supposed to use visual aids in this case? Aside from that, however, the inner soul nature of the children is such that something is true because a teacher to whom they feel sympathetic, who is an authority to them as a matter of course, has pronounced it true. They feel something to be beautiful because a natural authority finds it beautiful; they find something good because this authority finds it good. The authority figure incorporates the true, the beautiful and the good. It is bad for a person to have to acquire a feeling for the true, the good, and the beautiful as a matter of principle, on the basis of abstract commandments or all kinds of rational rules, before having acquired it at the right age—the age between the change of teeth and puberty—by having it confront him or her in the person of another human being. We should first learn that something is true because a respected person declares it true, and only later recognize the inner abstract laws of truth, which actually can have an effect on us only after we achieve sexual maturity.

Surely you do not expect someone who wrote 7he Philosophy of Freedom over thirty years ago to go to bat for the principle of authority in a place where it does not belong. However, the authoritative principle that children demand by their very nature absolutely does belong in the elementary school. Teachers themselves, with their rationality, their hearts and feelings, and their whole nature as human beings, are guidelines with regard to the true, the good, and the beautiful as the children are meant to embrace them. The human relationship that comes about reaches right into how the children construe the true, the good, and the beautiful. All this is presented in greater detail in various pedagogical writings on Waldorf education which are available for you to read.²

But let us now consider the position Waldorf teachers are in as a result of acknowledging this principle of natural authority and trying to apply it to its fullest extent. They depend on not having this natural authority undermined in any way. We must keep in mind that at the age when the change of teeth is taking place, even in families in which a lack of harmony prevails between the child and the parents, the child is inwardly close to the parents. This closeness is so strong that it basically outshines anything else that comes under consideration with regard to the being of the child at this age. This means that even if a child confronts his or her parents with antipathy, to use a severe term, a totally unshakable authoritative relationship to the parents is present subconsciously. I can present this only briefly here, but the matter can be verified in all its details. A true psychology, a true study of the soul, teaches us that even when children come into conflict with their parents and home when they are losing their baby teeth or in the years just after that, they are actually totally under the authority of the parents in the subtle, subconscious psychological layers of their being. And who would wish it otherwise? This is simply the relationship nature provides. If I were to depict the course that humanity’s evolution would follow if this were not the case, it would make a horrible picture. This means, however, that in their now completely different field of activity, where teachers are no longer examples to imitate but speakers who use their authority to present what enters the child, teachers must take a more subtle approach in influencing what the child has become in his or her inmost being as a result of parents and home. There is no other way of responding to the individuality of a child with your authority than by being able to link up fully consciously with what the child has become as a result of parents and home. The instinctive result of this in the Waldorf teacher is an inner urge to establish a connection to the parents.

There is a very specific reason why this urge develops. The spirit of Waldorf education is not a one-sided one; it encompasses the spirit, the soul, and the body equally. It would be a total misunderstanding of the spirit of Waldorf Education to believe that the physical aspect, whether in a healthy or an unhealthy state, is in any way underestimated in comparison to the spiritual aspect. The spirit of Waldorf education takes into account the whole human being in a child. But because it takes the whole human being into account without actually having the whole human being—it only has the child during school hours and perhaps for a short time before and after—it must experience an inner need to be in the closest possible contact with the parents, with the home in which the child spends the rest of his or her time.

It really is true with us—and I have often said this, particularly within the Waldorf School itself—that an educator does not need to be afraid of large classes. To set up small classes for pedagogical reasons means to count on a pedagogical weakness. That is not what is going on here. If it were desirable to work toward having smaller classes in the Waldorf school, the reason for it would be so that the teacher would have more possibility of establishing a connection to the parents of all the students in the class. That is what the teacher must do, out of the whole spirit of the Waldorf school.

But let us consider something else, since I am only trying to highlight a few of life’s stages. Those who can observe children in real life find that there is an extremely important point in life between the ages of nine and ten, approximately. You can see this point approaching; a certain inner crisis makes its presence known. It is not that the children start asking especially rational questions, but this crisis becomes evident when otherwise lively children start to hang their heads, when quiet ones become loud, when they give evidence of all sorts of unhealthy conditions, and so on. What is going on here is that in the child’s subconscious—and a great deal in the being of a child is in the subconscious rather than in consciousness—a question appears, a question that is not formulated rationally, but is active only in perception: Is the natural authority that has given me what is true, good, and beautiful up to now, is the natural authority that is the personification of truth, goodness and beauty, actually that? The doubt need not be expressed out loud, but it is there; it infuses the life of the child in the way I have described.

At this stage in a child's life, it is important for the teacher to have a healthy, independent gift of observation in order to find the right word and the right way of acting. Many things are needed—tact, instinct, intuition. Then you will be able to do something at this point in the child’s life that will be of wideranging significance for the entire earthly life that follows. If you find the comments, the actions and the relationship that can confirm for the child in an individually appropriate way that he or she was right in seeing a natural authority in you, then you have done something out of your inmost soul to become a true benefactor of that child.

Lucky the person who after this point around the ninth or tenth year can continue to look up to and respect an authority as a matter of course! No individual can become a free being in the course of his or her life without first learning, before entering puberty, to arrange life in accordance with how a highly respected person acts. To submit out of inner instinctive freedom in this way, to face such a person, recognizing that it is right to do as he or she does—that is what starts to make something out of the potentials for freedom that are concealed in a person.

In short, we as Waldorf teachers must maintain our natural authority in all respects and in the most subtle way. How can we do this? It is possible if our interaction with parents arouses the feeling in them that it is all right for them to influence their children to see the natural authority in the teacher. This may sound trivial, but it is true: Waldorf teachers should never pass up the opportunity to show themselves to the children’s parents in their true colors, so that the parents know who they are dealing with. This can sometimes be done in five minutes. The parent’s tone of voice, the nuance of each sentence they speak about the school, should be directed toward supporting natural authority in school. The connection between school and home cannot be close enough.

Still a third thing: If you have in front of you two, three or four sets of curricula and school regulations, all of them very cleverly thought out, then you know what you have to do. You have the curriculum, you have the regulations; that is what you have to do. But that is not how things are in the Waldorf School. If we are thinking in the spirit of the Waldorf School, it is right to think that some things must be different than they are in public education. Many people today cannot grasp that. And cleverness is so prevalent in our times. I cannot emphasize enough how clever people in our times are in comparison to other times. But it is just this rational cleverness—and I mean this quite seriously.

I am not being ironic—that commits the greatest stupidities. Nevertheless, people are clever, and this is expressed in a great variety of ways. If thirty people sit together and plan a school reform, it can be so clever that it cannot be disputed. And then lay thinkers can say, “That’s brilliant, it would be impossible to create better schools than these people have done with their points 1, 2, 3, and 4.” But just try to take it further, and look at the schools that have been created through those points 1, 2, 3, and 4. The principles are very clever, the statutes and paragraphs are very clever, but you cannot do anything with them in real life. The only way to do anything in real life is to feel life itself pulsing within you and to create out of this pulsing life.

This is where Waldorf teachers stand: They have no statutes and paragraphs, but only advice and suggestions which they must shape according to their own individualities. If you prescribe strictly what teachers have to do in school, then they should all be just alike. Just think of the consequences of that. If the regulations were seriously enforced, if we were to put into effect these very well-meaning abstract pedagogical principles that hold that there is only one way of teaching, then you would no longer be able to tell one teacher from another. You would meet one teacher and think it was some other one, because they would both be teaching according to the same abstract principles. But teachers are human beings. They are individuals. And they can only work if they can put themselves into it with the full independence of their being. Only then can they be really effective. But then they have to know life. You can only work in real live if you allow life to affect you. But what kind of life do you encounter in school? The parents’ life as it continues to work in the children. Our teachers are steered away from paragraphs and principles toward the real, immediate life of the children. This must flow into our methodology, into how we arrange all of our teaching.

So, ladies and gentlemen, if you could be a fly on the wall and listen in on our teachers’ meetings sometimes, you would hear how all the details of home are actually being taken into account and how intimately they are discussed with regard to how they shed light on the children. And if you were that fly on the wall, you would also find out that these teachers’ meetings are an ongoing learning process, that our educational practices are constantly evolving toward higher and more subtle effectiveness. It cannot be different if the school is meant to be a living organism, rather than a dead one. This means that the Waldorf School, because it calls itself an independent school, is an institution whose innermost being points to parents and home with regard to understanding the child as a total being.

Let us say that we get to know a child who is lacking in intellectual ability. That can happen. And there are many ways in which a lack of intellectual ability can be corrected, can be developed into something better. But we need a point of departure. Let us say that we get to know the child’s father and mother, and they are very intelligent. It does sometimes happen that children who are not intellectually gifted have very intelligent parents. It can also be just the opposite, that parents who are not intellectually gifted have highly gifted children. In any case, we will learn a very great deal about alleviating the child’s lack of intellectual ability if we look at the parents whom the child imitated up to the change of teeth. If we do so, we will find not only a theoretical explanation, but also suggestions for implementing what we have to do about it. The emotional life plays a very significant role in children of school age. It even plays into morality in that it receives the good only through sympathy for the good in the teacher. Children’s emotional life becomes transparent when we can see through their feeling into their parents’ particular variety of feeling life. This applies equally to the life of the will.

People whose intelligence tells them that an individual must be like this and such because that is average and proper human nature need not consider the parents. However, if we know that things and beings have origins, if we look to the source rather than to something abstract, then we must consider the child’s parents and home.

Waldorf education leads us along the path toward reality because it tries to live and breathe the spirit of reality, a spirit that is in accordance with nature and in accordance with the soul. And this path toward reality leads away from school and toward the parents’ home. This is the reason behind everything that can awaken the teacher’s interest in the parents and the parents’ interest in the teachers in the school. The parents’ evenings that are organized by the Waldorf School are there in order to create a bond between school and home. What we do in these parents’ evenings is meant to allow the parents to see the attitude and soul-constitution of the faculty.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is the practical implementation of what is ultimately present as the highest—I cannot say principle, but the highest view in the spirit of Waldorf education. Out of the depths of their inner soul life and out of this spirit of Waldorf education, Waldorf teachers must realize that the parents are entrusting the school with the most precious thing they have when they send their children to us. These parents have had many experiences in life; perhaps they have been tested by life. This does not mean that they wish their children to remain untested, but they do wish them to be spared some of the difficult experiences that they themselves had to go through. For this and many other reasons, parents attach a great deal of hope to the moment when they entrust their child to a school. Out of the whole spirit of Waldorf education, our teachers know what is being entrusted to them. On the basis of views such as those I have characterized, they would like their effect on the children to be such that when the children are released from school and return to their parents, the parents can say, “We knew it all the time, ever since we first saw the school, that our hopes would be fulfilled.” However, this is not a conclusion they can come to at the last minute when their children graduate. It can mature gradually only through the interaction between school and home.

Thus, we can turn our backs on many different educational experiments, and even on well-intentioned pedagogical ideals, and turn to the spirit of Waldorf education, realizing that there is an extremely healthy instinct at work in children being together with their parents, and that it must therefore also be healthy for the school to grow close to this relationship by finding the right way to approach the parents.

Among the many things that the Waldorf School aspires to, which can all be characterized by saying that this school wants to rise above abstract principles and cleverness to a reality that is full of life, the main thing is that the Waldorf School wants to find a way to the most life-filled reality in the child’s existence. And in the existence of the small child, the child of school age, this reality is the parents.

This school with its spirit wants to be, not a school of theories, abstractions, and inflexible theoretical principles, but one full of life and reality. That is why it tries to find its way into the reality of the parents’ home.

• 1. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, 1762-1814, Reden an die deutsche Nation [“Speeches to the German Nation”] given in Berlin during the Napoleonic occupation of 1807-08.
• 2. See Rudolf Steiner’s 7The Renewal of Education, Kolisko Archive Publications for Rudolf Steiner Schools Fellowship Publications, Forest Row, Sussex, England, 1980 [Die Erneuerung der padagogisch-didaktischen Kunst durch Geisteswissenschaft, Dornach, 1977], 14 lectures given in Basel, 1920, GA 301; Education and Modern Spiritual Life, Garber Publications, Blauvelt, NY, 1989 [Gegenwärtiges Geistesleben und Erziehung, Dornach, 1923], 14 lectures given in Ilkley, 1923, GA 307; The Roots of Education, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1996 [Anthroposophische Pädagogik und ihre Voraussetzungen, Dornach, 1972], 5 lectures given in Bern, 1924, GA 309; Human Values in Education, Rudolf Steiner Press, London, 1971 [Der pädagogische Wert der Menschenerkenntnis und der Kulturwert der Pädagogik, Dornach 1965], 10 lectures given in Arnheim, 1924, GA 310; The Kingdom of Childhood, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1995 [Die Kunst des Erziehens aus dem Erfassen der Menschenwesenheit, Dornach, 1979], 7 lectures given in Torquay, 1924, GA 311; The Education of the Child and Early Lectures on Education, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, NY, 1996 [Die Erziehung des Kindes vom Gesichtspunkte der Geisteswissenschaft, Dornach, 1978].

Ladies and gentlemen;¹ dear children! In the name of my company, the Waldorf-Astoria, I extend a cordial welcome to all of you who have come here to take part in this simple little opening ceremony for our Waldorf School. I would especially like to heartily welcome our honored guests. I want to thank them for putting in an appearance here today and for the interest in our undertaking that this demonstrates.

Ladies and gentlemen! Founding the Waldorf School was not something that sprang from the mere quirk of an individual. Rather, the idea was born out of insight into the needs of our present time. I simply felt the need to truly call the first so-called “comprehensive school” into existence and thereby to alleviate a social need, so that in future not only the sons and daughters of the affluent but also the children of simple workers will be in a position to acquire the education that is needed nowadays to ascend to a higher level of culture. In this sense, it is a deep personal satisfaction to me that it has been possible to call this institution into existence. But today it is not enough to simply create a facility; it is also necessary to fill it with a new spirit. And anthroposophically oriented spiritual science is our guarantee that a spirit of this sort will fill this facility. I feel a deep inner responsibility at this point to express heartfelt thanks to the one who has conveyed this spiritual science to us, our beloved Dr. Rudolf Steiner. But I also thank the authorities who have made it possible for us to bring this facility into existence, so that we are in the fortunate position today of really turning our thoughts into deeds.

But now I turn especially to you, dear staff and managers of the Waldorf-Astoria Company: Let us be clear that by calling such a thing into existence, we also take on a great responsibility. Let us be clear on this, and let us solemnly swear and promise today to show ourselves worthy to be the first in the German Empire to have the possibility of enacting this idea of the comprehensive school, which has been spoken about so much, right here in our city of Stuttgart. Let us show the world that we are not only idealists, but also people of practical deeds, and that our children, strengthened by this school, will in future be able to cope with daily life in a better and fuller manner.

It is in this sense that we send you, dear children, to this Waldorf School, so that when you leave this place you may draw from it the strength to cope, as whole human beings, with the difficult life that awaits you. But there are also joys that await you in this school. I was privileged to take part in the course that Dr. Steiner gave for the teachers, and so I became very aware of how much we ourselves missed out on in our youth, and how difficult it is later on in life to make up for what we missed back then. It is truly a matter dear to my heart to say that since we ourselves were not in a position to enjoy this blessing in earlier times, we must at least thank our destiny that we can make it available for others today. And thus I can say to you children who are entering this new school that there are pleasures waiting for you. And those who were privileged to take the course that Dr.Steiner gave for the new teachers know that this new method means that learning will no longer be a pain for you as it was for us older ones; for you, it will be a joy and a pleasure. So be glad, children, that you will be allowed to enjoy this school. You may not be able to understand this today in all its implications, but when you graduate from this place of education, show that you are a match for life and its challenges, show the world the wonderful fruits of this new method of education that will teach you to be purposeful individuals able to cope with life.

We also realize, however, that what we can create here is just a small beginning. The responsibility is great and the burden rests heavily on those who have accepted this task, and as time passes the attacks that come from all sides may also be great, but there is one thing we can already say today: The will within us will be so strong and the thoughts so mighty and the courage so great that we will also be able to overcome all the things that may try to hinder us, because we know what a lofty goal we are striving for, and because we are always aware of the responsibility that we have taken on.

And you, dear teachers who have taken up this work, who have yourselves been introduced to the spirit that is to ensoul this school, you know what a great responsibility has been laid upon you, and I address this request to all of you who will participate as faculty in the Waldorf School—may you all, along with me, be aware of the extraordinary gravity of this responsibility, and may you never cease to feel this responsibility as deeply as I do at all times.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, in handing over this institute to the staff and management of the Waldorf-Astoria company, and thus also to the public, I wish from the bottom of my heart that the spirit that brought us a Goethe, a Schiller, a Herder and whatever their names may be, all those great cultural heroes of the past, that this spirit may reign here again, so that through the school of the future this spirit can once again enter our German fatherland. If this is the case, then all of us who carry the responsibility for it will be aware that we are the servants of these spiritual forces. Then a day will dawn when our poor fatherland can begin to ascend from the depths of its great need, both of body and of soul, and we may hope that then there will be more people who can help to lead our people upward to the heights where our cultural heroes, a Goethe and a Schiller and so forth, once stood, and further still.

And in once again expressing my wish that this undertaking of ours may happily thrive, I do solemnly swear and promise in the name of the Waldorf staff, in the name of our school, in the name of our children, that this school will become a garden and a fountain of everything that is good, beautiful and true.

• 1. This address was published in the Waldorf-Nachrichten [Waldorf News], vol.1, no.19, October 1919.

Several weeks ago, when we all came to this school for the first time, I visited you more often. Then there were a few weeks when I had to be quite far away from here, but each morning when I got up and went to work, I wondered, “What are my dear Waldorf children and their teachers doing now?” This thought came to me often during the day. And now, in the festive Christmas season, I have had the privilege of being able to visit you again. I went into all your classes and asked many of you, “Do you love your teachers?” [“Yes!” shout the children.] And you see, you answered me warmly, just like that. And then I said to you, “That is an especially nice Christmas gift for me!”

And it is a nice Christmas gift for me. You see, dear children, I have to think about how you have been spending your days since Herr Molt gave us the gift of this Waldorf School. After resting from evening until morning in the divine spirit that watches over your souls from the time you go to sleep until the time you wake up, and after you have washed and dressed and gotten all ready, you come up here to this beautiful schoolhouse. And I believe that many of you, maybe even all of you, look forward to everything that will be here for you in this beautiful schoolhouse. [“Yes!” shout the children.]

Dear children, you have reason to look forward to it. You see, while I was away from you I thought of you often, and in my thoughts I wondered, “What are my dear Waldorf children doing?” And I also said to myself, “They will be doing just fine, because they have nice capable teachers, and these nice capable teachers approach them with real love and are working very hard so that something good will come of the children.” And then I had to think of how you look forward to coming up here and of the love you show for your teachers. These teachers have to work long and hard to be able to teach you all the good and beautiful things that will make good and capable people out of you.

And you know, my dear children, I was especially pleased when I was in the classes and some children would come in playing the part of Ruprecht¹ or of little angels, and they sang and talked about the child Jesus, about the holy Christ Child. It was beautiful and grand that you could speak about the Christ with such love, and that you could listen with such love.

And do you know where your teachers get all the strength and ability they need so that they can teach you to grow up to be good and capable people? They get it from the Christ, whom we think about at Christmas. We think about how He came into the world to bring joy to all people, and you gave some beautiful presentations about Him today.

You see, my dear children, there are beings on earth that are not like human beings—for example, the animals around us—and we might often think that we should envy these animals. You can look up and see the birds flying, and perhaps then you might say, “Oh, if only we could fly, too! Then we would be able to soar into the air.” We human beings cannot fly like the birds because we have no wings. However, dear children, we can fly into the element of the spiritual, and we have two wings to fly there. The wing on the left is called “hard work,” and the other wing on the right is called “paying attention.” We cannot see them, but these two wings—hard work and paying attention—make it possible for us to fly into life and become people who are really ready for life. If we work hard and pay attention as children, and if we have teachers that are as good and capable as yours, then what makes us fit for life will come to us, and on the wings of hard work and paying attention we will be able to fly into life, where the love of our teachers carries us.

You know, you can sometimes think that there are things that are more fun than learning. But that is not really true; there is no greater joy than learning. You see, when you enjoy something that lets you be inattentive and does not make you work hard, then the joy is over immediately. You enjoy it, and then the joy is gone. But when you enjoy what you can learn, when you are flying on the wings of hard work and paying attention, then my dear children, something stays behind in your souls. (Later on you will know what the soul is.) Something stays in your soul, and you can enjoy that over and over again. When we have learned something good and proper, it comes back again and again; we enjoy it again and again with a joy that never stops. But the other fun things, the ones that come only from inattentiveness and laziness, they come to an end.

You see, because many of you—all of you, I would like to believe—want to work hard and pay attention to what your nice teachers are giving you, I was so glad to see your love for your teachers streaming out of your eyes when I saw you again. And so that you do not forget it, I would like to ask you again, “Don't you all sincerely love your teachers?” [“Yes, we do!” shout the children.] Now, that is what you should always say. That is what you should always feel, and then the spirit whose earthly life and birth we remember at Christmas time, the Christ spirit, will take joy in you.

Now, my dear children, when you have felt your teachers' love all day long up here, then you can go home again and tell your parents about what you have learned, and your parents will be glad and say to themselves, “Well, our children are going to grow up to be good and capable people.”

Make sure to write that in your souls, for now is a good time to do that. When we think of the great festival that reminds us that the Christ entered our world to bring comfort and joy to all human beings who turn their hearts and souls toward Him, then we can also inscribe in our souls the intention to become good human beings. Because the power of Christ is helping you, you will become what you write in your souls today, what you seriously intend to become. And when I come again and see that you have made even more progress, when I come again and see that you can once again show me that you have taken love for your teachers into your hearts and kept it there, then I will again be very glad. My warmest Christmas wish for you today is that this love will grow ever more perfect in you, and that you may continue to unfold the left wing of the human soul, which is hard work, and the right wing, which is paying attention.

And now that I have spoken to the children, let me still say a few words to those who have accompanied them here. What I just said to the children flows from a deeply satisfied heart, because I really have received the most beautiful Christmas greeting from them. When I came into the school, what wafted toward me was something I would like to call the good spirit of this school. It was the really good spirit, the good and unifying spirit, that brings teachers and children together here.

You see, in these days a Christmas mood was resting on all the serious teaching that was taking place, and it was deeply satisfying to perceive this Christmas mood, into which the revelation of Christ speaks, if I may put it like that, in all the corridors and especially in the classrooms. This was no mere supplement to the regular lessons. You could feel that our faculty managed to warm and enlighten everything that was being presented to the children's souls and hearts and understanding with the real, true spirit of Christ. Here, in accordance with the wishes of the divine spirit, we do not speak the name of Christ after every sentence—for “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain!”—but it is nonetheless true that this spirit of Christ is with us in all our individual subjects and in every teaching activity. This is something that can readily be felt, especially at this time of year. Perhaps you too have been able to feel it in what came to meet you out of this Christmas assembly.

And finally, to conclude my Christmas greeting, I would like to appeal to the children whom you have sent here. I hope their progress pleases you.

Children, when you enter these rooms with the other boys and girls, recall that you are meant to love each other warmly, to love each and every other one. If love prevails among you, you will thrive under the car e of your teachers, and your parents at home will have no concerns and will have loving thoughts of how you are spending your time here.

There is something we may say today, ladies and gentlemen, which should resound, as the spirit of this school, from every word and glance the children bring home to you who have sent them here, as an echo of what is meant to permeate all of our human journeying on earth since the mystery of Golgotha took place, to permeate all human work and activity, and especially all activity in which the spirit has work to do. May the words that ring in our souls today weave through everything that human beings do out of self-understanding, weave like a warming breath of air or beam of sunlight:

The revelation of the divine from heavenly heights,
And peace to human beings on earth who are of good Will!

Luke 2:14

Our great ideal is to cultivate this good will in the children of the Waldorf School. Our concern must be to find the governance of the spirit of the world in our work, in everything we do. May the Christmas message, “The revelation of the spirit of God from the heavenly heights, and peace to human beings on earth who are of good will,” trickle down into all the work of the Waldorf School as well. May the school's working strength be governed by brotherly love and by the peace that inspires and supports all work! That, dear ladies and gentlemen, is my Christmas greeting to you today.

• 1. Ruprecht: in the European tradition, the Moorish helper of St. Nicholas, who carries a black sack and administers symbolic punishments to children who have been bad during the past year.

Dear children!

Last time I was able to be here, I told you how gladI am when our dear friend Herr Molt comes to pick me up in Dornach, where the school for big people, for grown-ups, is being built.¹ Then I can be with you again for a little while and see what you are doing.

And why am I so glad when Herr Molt comes to bring me here? Because it makes me think, “Now I am going to the school that was founded for our dear children”—that is, for you who are here because you long to become capable people who are ready for life.

Because I have only been here for a short time, I have not been able to see much yet—just the tiny little folks in the first grade, and the eighth grade—but what I did see gave me great pleasure. I saw how patiently and lovingly the first grade teacher had helped the children make some progress, and I was privileged to spend a very nice lesson with the eighth grade students. They were hearing about what human history tells us of how human beings on earth are involved in an evolution, an ongoing progress, that is driven by the spirit: Something that lives in human history gives us the desire to work on into the future, the spirit in which this was being conveyed to the souls of our dear young friends in the eighth grade was very beautiful. I am looking forward to seeing all the other classes, too. I am always pleased when I see how what our friend Herr Molt planted here is beginning to develop.

You entered this school when the fall was approaching. At that time we tried to think about what we would experience here and what we wanted to foster—love for each other, love for our teachers, love for God, who speaks to us from everything. And now, while you have been enjoying what your teachers presented to you each morning, you have also been experiencing what comes up out of the earth, what the spring draws out of it. You have seen the trees growing green. And now we remember what we hear when we go out into the woods. We hear the songbirds, and we are glad.

But today we have also heard something else, something for which I am especially thankful. We have heard you, under the direction of your teachers, express something that comes from inside of you. We can hear the birds singing out in the woods, and we can also hear what you have expressed to us, but there is a difference between them.

We are glad when we hear the little birds singing. But we know that something else is present when we hear what you perform for us. This is something that we call the human soul. It is your human souls that speak to us and sing to us. This is what human beings make out of what speaks to them out there in nature. In the woods, we hear the birds, but when you sing many other things that are heard come toward us out from the human soul.

But there are also other things out there in nature. You see how the plants grow and the trees turn green. All of this is called forth by the light. Light floods the entire universe. Light and warmth are what call everything up out of the earth, all those things that delight your eyes and hearts. What sounds in your ears, brought to you through the patience and persistence of your teachers, what travels through the world as light and then enters your eyes—we hear all of this resounding from you, not only when you sing and dance, but also when you tell what you have learned to calculate and what you have learned about everything that is human. In your souls, this turns to light. And just think what the plants would be without the sun. They would not be able to come out of the ground. They would always remain roots that would not be able to develop flowers, and it would be dark. This is what it would be like for you if you went through the world without ever finding a school where you could learn something. You would be like a plant that never finds the sun. The soul finds its sun in people from whom it can learn something.

This is why we are so glad that a school like this has been founded as a result of Herr Molt's insight, and why you are so glad to be able to be in a school that you love. Seek the light of the soul, just as the plants seek the light and warmth of the sun!

I do not want to always say the same things to you, because I also do not want to always hear the same things when I come, but there is one thing that I want to hear from you again and again. You must answer me; this is what I am most curious about. And so I ask you, children, do you still love your teachers? [“Yes!” shout the children.] That is what I want to hear from the majority of you. This is what you are meant to take up into your souls. Love for your teachers will support you as you go out into life. Again and again, each time I come here, I would like to experience that you have made progress in learning, but I would also like you to show me that you have continued to love your teachers. You can be sure that in the great building that is being built for grown-ups in Dornach, where big people are meant to learn something, we all think about the Waldorf School here, and we think of it with love and joy. There are a lot of people who are thinking of the Waldorf School with love today, and they are thinking, “How good and capable these people will grow up to be, since as children they were filled with love for their teachers.”

Oh, there is something I must tell you—Frau Steiner sends her greetings, since she cannot be here today.

There is a spirit that is always meant to prevail here, a spirit that your teachers bring to this place. From the spirit of the cosmos, they learn to bring this spirit here to you; they take in what St. Paul said with all of their souls. The spirit of Christ prevails throughout our school; whether we are doing arithmetic, reading, writing, or whatever we do, we do it with the attitude that the Christ awakened in us:

“I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.”

Matthew 28:20.

This is the spirit that is meant to prevail here, and it will do so through what your teachers bring to you with love, patience and endurance. May it prevail through what lives in your souls!

Be with this spirit when you are in your class, and think of it when you leave. Be glad in your souls that you are coming back to the Waldorf School where the sun is lit for you, the sun that people need for life.

If there is someone among you who does not pay attention, there should be one of you who can go to that person and lovingly say, “Hey, hard work and paying attention get us up the mountain of life. Upward, friend! You should always be going up the mountain of life.”² This is how each of you should help the friend who falters a little—all of you for each one, all for one, one for all, lovingly. Love needs to be present among you, for each other and for your teachers. This is something we want to cultivate as part of the good spirit of the Waldorf School.

• 1. The wooden building of the Goetheanum, the Free School of Spiritual Science, was under construction from 1913–1921.
• 2. In the original German, this is a reference to a song sung by the students at the beginning of the assembly.

My dear children!

Today, now that we are at the end of our first school year here in our dear Waldorf School, let us inscribe on our souls something of why we are actually in this school. What does it mean that our dear friend Herr Molt, together with Frau Molt, founded this Waldorf School for you, my dear children, and for humankind? What does it mean that you come here every morning in order to learn something good? What does it mean, above all, that there are people who are taking great pains to guide you into life so that you will grow up to be good and capable people?

You know, my dear children, that I have often come here during this school year, and in each class I always asked you a question, a question that comes straight from my heart. I often asked you, “Do you love your teachers?” [“Yes!” shout the children.] And you know, you always answered me as warmly as you just did today.

Now there will be weeks in which you do not see your teachers for a while, and so now I want to say something different to you. I hope your hearts will often answer this question during vacation. Now I would like to say to you, “Now that you are not going to see your teachers, learn to be grateful to them.” In the same way that you have learned, tried hard to learn to love your teachers, now learn to feel firmly in your heart that you are grateful to your teachers, so that when you ask yourselves, “Am I grateful to my teachers?” you can honestly and heartily say, “Yes, I am grateful.”

Now there is something else I want to say to you. You see, my dear children, here with us it should not happen that as Waldorf School students you say, “Hey, school is over now; if s vacation. When we're in school, we have to work hard and learn, but now we can be lazy. We don't have to do anything. We're glad that we can be lazy.” You know that is not what we want to say. We should say something else; we should say, “Yes, it's a beautiful day. During the day we experience many beautiful things along with some that are sad and painful, but what would human beings be if they could not experience through their senses everything that divine spirituality has put into the world, everything that is so great and beautiful and true.”

But unless we can also sleep and rest, we cannot use our ears and eyes properly to hear and see all the beautiful things divine spirituality has put into the world. Think about how after enjoying the day, you have to rest at night, and then in the morning you are strengthened again. Your eyes see better and your ears hear better. If you had to stay awake all the time, you would surely not be able to enjoy and learn about life in all its truth and beauty the way divine spirituality made it. This is also how it is in life as a whole. You should not think, “Now that it's vacation we can be lazy;” you should think, “All of what we received from our dear teachers, everything that humankind has learned so that individuals can know it—we received all this, and now we need a little rest, so that when we have rested, we can go back into our classes and be fresher and more lively. In fact, we will each go into the next grade; with new forces we will once again take into our hearts what our teachers will give us through their love and hard work, what humanity has learned in service to humanity.” This is how we should think of it—that we are resting during the vacation to get strong again for the whole new school year.

Then, my dear children, I would like to tell you a little about what it means that this Waldorf School of ours exists, and what it means that we are here in this school. You see, the person you are going to grow up to be, this person has a physical body, a soul and a spirit. You each have a body, a soul, and a spirit. And when a person is very little and is born into the world, this body and soul and spirit are all very incomplete. In you, they are still incomplete, but they are supposed to become more complete. Herein the Waldorf School your body will be shaped to become skilled at everything a person has to do in life. Your teachers have worked hard at this on your behalf; you have been introduced to eurythmy, for example, which works to make your body very skillful in life, and many other things have been brought to you so that you will become people who are skillful and capable and strong in their bodies. When you are small, you are fairly clumsy. You have to become more skillful. It is the same with the soul which is in each one of you. But it has to be developed so that it can send out threads in all directions for life. This is like unwinding the strands from a tangled ball of yarn—the threads for your life have to be untangled from your soul. This is how the soul develops, and this happens for you so that you become good and capable with regard to your forces for life. Good strong forces for life have to be fetched up out of your souls. And your spirit—yes, my dear children, if we did not educate the spirit, we would not be human beings at all. The spirit must be educated so that we become very good and capable human beings.

Now you see, when a person has worked all day or when a child has played and learned well and then sleeps, sometimes dreams come to them from their sleep. Most of you have experienced dreams. Sometimes they are very beautiful dreams, sometimes ugly dreams. And now you are going to go rest during vacation. Then something will come to you that can be compared to a dream. You see, during vacation, when you think back to when you were in school, it may be that you think, “Oh, I had nice teachers, I learned a lot, I was glad to be able to go to school.” And when you think that, those are beautiful dreams during your vacation. And when you think, “Oh, I should have been less lazy; I didn't like to go to school,” and so forth, then you are having bad dreams during vacation. Think back often during this vacation to when you were in school; for example, think like this: “My thoughts are drawn back to the Waldorf School, where my body is shaped for skillful activity, where my soul is developed to be strong in life, where my spirit develops so that I can be truly human.” When you think often like this about how your body is being shaped, your soul developed and your spirit educated, you will send yourself a good dream for your time of rest, and then your vacation time will also contribute something to making you a good and capable person in life.

You know, when I came today, one of your good little fellow students gave me something. Let⁷s see what it is. Look, this is what he gave me—a washcloth and a flower! Now I guess I must wash myself and dry my hands, and perhaps the flower is meant to say that your lessons are something that blooms as beautifully as this nice little white flower. [Rudolf Steiner holds up the washcloth.] And perhaps this could remind us that what we learn here is also something we can use to wash away everything in our souls that is incomplete, all bad thoughts and feelings that want to make us be lazy and not pay attention. I would like to give you each a little spiritual cloth so you can wash away all the laziness and lack of hard work and inattentiveness, and so on. So I am very glad that you have given me this little symbol and that I can show you how to use it to wash away a whole lot of what should not be in your souls.

And look at this little flower! You have learned many things here that you needed to learn, and what you learned is so many little flowers like this in your soul. Think about this when you remind yourselves that your thoughts are hurrying back to the Waldorf School where your bodies are trained to be skillful, your soul is developed to be strong for life, and your spirit unfolds so that you can be properly human—and think about how flowers like this are being cultivated in your soul day after day, and how grateful you should be for that. Everything in life can be of service to us and help us think about what is right. That, dear children, is what I wanted to say to you.

Think about each other, too! You have gotten to know each other and also, I hope, learned to love each other. Think about each other very, very often, and think about how good it was that you came together so that your teachers could help you grow into good and capable people. Don't think, “Now we can be lazy,” but think, “We need to rest, and when we have rested we will come back and be fresh and ready to receive what our dear teachers bring to us.”

Arid now, although you will not yet be able to understand it, I would like to say a few words in your presence to your dear teachers, who have now put all the diligent work of the Waldorf School behind them, and I would like to shake their hands. First of all, I would like to shake hands with Herr Molt and Frau Molt for having created this Waldorf School for us so that we can try to do something for humanity in its dire straits. My dear friends—as I said, I am speaking to the teachers, but you children can also hear it and can remember it later—the years behind us have been bitter ones for humanity, years in which people beat and bloodied and shot each other. There are still other bitter things in front of us, for the times still look very bad. But then the Waldorf teachers were the first to find the courage to appear here and to start to believe something that I am convinced that people today must start to believe above all else. The Waldorf teachers came here and said, “Yes, we have to work on the children so that when we are old, something will have happened to the children that can prevent unhappiness and bitterness of this sort from overcoming people.” This requires a certain courage and it requires hard work, but above all it requires something that awakens in human hearts the possibility of not sleeping, but of staying awake. That, dear Waldorf teachers, is why I want to shake your hands so warmly. If many people would wake up and look at the decision you have come to instead of sleeping through it, if what happens here would find successors, then you would realize that you were the first to work at something that is so very necessary for our future as human beings.

Dear children, when your teachers came into school each morning, they were people who clearly grasped the task of our times and devoted themselves diligently to what was required of them. And it was always a warm moment for me when I asked you, “Do you love your teachers?” and you so heartily answered, “Yes!” During the vacation I will also wonder whether you are grateful to your teachers. But you, dear Waldorf teachers, let me warmly shake your hands. I thank you in the name of the spirit of humanity which we are trying to cultivate throughout our spiritual movement. In this spirit, I shake your hands for everything you have accomplished on behalf of the future ideals of humanity. Today is the day for us to be able to remember these things, and it is the day when you children should feel how grateful you ought to be to these teachers of yours.

There is still something I would like to say today. Alongside everything we have learned here, which the individual teachers have demonstrated so beautifully, there is something else present, something that I would like to call the spirit of the Waldorf School. It is meant to lead us to true piety again. Basically, it is the spirit of Christianity that wafts through all our rooms, that comes from every teacher and goes out to every child, even when it seems that something very far from religion is being taught, such as arithmetic, for example. Here it is always the spirit of Christ that comes from the teacher and is to enter the hearts of the children—this spirit that is imbued with love, real human love. This is why I want you children to feel that not only have you learned something here, you have also gradually learned to feel what it is for one person to love another. And so now as you are going on vacation, I would like you to think of all your schoolmates with a warmhearted “Until we meet again! Until we meet again, when we comeback strengthened into these rooms, when we can once again work with our teachers on what will make us into good and capable people.”

You see, dear children, you must consider how life here in this school is connected to the whole of human life. When people get old, they are seventy or eighty years old. Life brings joy and sorrow, beauty and ugliness. When we get old, we are seventy or eighty, as I said. We can compare our life to a day with twenty-four hours. If this day represents our life, then a year that we spend in this day of life would be about twenty minutes long, and your eight years in primary school would be something like two to three hours out of your whole life. So the time that you spend in the Waldorf School makes up two or three hours out of your whole life. And when we go through the other twenty hours we have for living, for working, for becoming aware of the spirit, for doing things with other people so that something good can happen in the world—when we go through these hours, it can be a real comfort for our hearts, a real strength for our lives, if we are able to realize that the two or three hours of life we spent in primary school gave us something for our whole life, gave us strength and spirit and the ability to work.

Let us say this to ourselves, my dear children, now on this last day of our first school year in the Waldorf School, but during the vacation, let us remember something else again and again. I would like to write it in your souls so that it blooms there like this cute little flower, so that you think of it often: “Let my thoughts hurry back to my dear Waldorf School, where my body is trained to work and to do good, where my soul is developed to be strong for life, where my spirit is awakened to be truly good and human.” We want you all to become such good and capable people someday, when you are grown up and out there in life.

I wanted to speak to you from heart to heart today. I wanted to say this to you out of love, and I say it to you so that you can take note of it. Once again, think of your thoughts hurrying back to your dear Waldorf School, where your body is shaped to work capably in life, where your soul is developed for strength in life, where your spirit is awakened to true humanity. That is how it should be. And so now we will leave each other, and when we come back, we will go on as we have done before.

Afterwards you will receive your reports.¹ Whoever gets a good report should not take it as an indication that it is now all right to be lazy, and whoever gets a bad report need not immediately start to cry, but should think about trying harder next year.

Out of the spirit of the Waldorf School, shake your teachers' hands and say to each other, “We will be back in fall to learn to do good work, to develop our souls to be strong for life, and to awaken our spirit to true humanity.”

And so, until we meet again!

• 1. At the end of the school year, instead of receiving grades, the children received brief characterizations of their behavior and of how they worked.

The following are three addresses given to the children of the first Waldorf school at school assemblies in 1919 and 1920. In the Christmas assembly address Steiner also spoke to the parents who were in attendance. Steiner had previously assisted the industrialist Emil Molt in establishing the school for the children of the factory workers of the Waldorf Astoria cigarette factory in Stuttgart, Germany. He made frequent visits, traveling from Switzerland, to work with the faculty of the school and to view the students' progress. (A chapter from Molt's autobiography describing the opening of the school appeared in Issue No. 2 of The Threefold Review.)

What is most revealing in these addresses is how open and straightforward Steiner was concerning the Christian basis of the school. Even though Christ is central to Anthroposophy, the world view based on spiritual-scientific research and inaugurated by Steiner, Anthroposophy is open to everyone regardless of religious background. Waldorf schools, which are based on Anthroposophy, are also open to families of any religious background.

A universal approach to Christianity is elaborated by Steiner in the following passages:

“Would a Buddhist be justified in saying that he may not acknowledge Christ because nothing is said to this effect in his scriptures? Is anything essential at stake when a truth is not found in particular writings or scriptures? Would it be right for a Buddhist to say that it is against the principles of Buddhism to believe in the truth of the Copernican theory of the universe, for no mention of it is made in his books? What applies to the Copernican theory applies equally to the findings of modern spiritual-scientific research concerning the Christ-being, namely, that because He has nothing to do with any particular denomination, the Christ can be accepted by a Hindu or an adherent of any other religion. Those who reject what spiritual science has to say about the Christ impulse in relation to the religious denominations simply do not understand what the true attitude to religion should be.

“Perhaps some day the time will come when it will be realized that what we have to say about the nature of the Christ impulse and its relation to all religious denominations and world-conceptions speaks directly to the heart and soul, as well as [endeavors] to deal consistently with particular phases of the subject. It is not easy for everyone to realize what efforts are made to bring together things that can lead to the true understanding of the Christ impulse needed by man in the present cycle of existence. Avowal of the belief in Christ has nothing fundamentally to do with any particular religion or religious system. A true Christian is simply one who is accustomed to regard every human being as bearing the Christ principle in himself, who looks for the Christ in a Chinese, a Hindu, or whoever he may be. In a man who avows his belief in Christ is founded the realization that the Christ impulse is not confined to one part of the earth. To imagine it as confined would be a complete fallacy. The reality is that since the mystery of Golgotha, Paul's proclamation to the region with which he was connected has been true—Christ died also for the heathen. Humanity must learn to understand that Christ did not come for one particular people, one particular epoch, but for all the peoples of the earth, for all of them! Christ has sown His spirit-seed in every human soul, and progress consists in the souls of men becoming conscious of this.”¹

• 1. Life Between Death and Rebirth (Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, N.Y.,1968), pp. 50–51.

Some of our friends have asked me to speak about language while I am here in Stuttgart. At such short notice and with our limited time, this will have to be rather sketchy, certainly more so than with our scientific course. And you will have to have even more forbearance than you did for my remarks on “light,” because what I say about language will simply be improvised. All I can do is to give you a few useful suggestions for your teaching here in the Waldorf School and also for teaching in general.

Perhaps we can find what we're after by first looking at some elements of language from an historical standpoint. Whatever I can bring together somewhat loosely today will be an introduction to further discussion during the rest of the time.

We can see especially in German how the development of a people’s language expresses also the development of its soul life. We must keep clearly in mind, however, that the relationship of individuals to their own language varies from century to century. The further we go back in the history of a people, the more life we find in everything pertaining to language, within the forces of the human soul as well as in the pliant forces of the human body. I have often been aware of this; you will find as you go through my books a quite conscious attempt to use terms of Germanic derivation, even in philosophical matters.¹ This is frowned upon by many of my detractors, who condemn exactly what has been done very consciously with languages in my books. It is extremely difficult nowadays to find in German the inner, living forces able to continue forming the language. It is particularly difficult to find semantic correspondences by picking up some little-used word or extending the forms of a common one, as for instance I tried to do with the word kraften [The German noun Kraft ‘force, strength’ has only its corresponding adjective kraftig ‘strong, robust’. Rudolf Steiner invented the corresponding verb kraften ‘to work actively, forcefully’ and the verbal noun das Kraften ‘actively working force or strength’.] I tried with this to put action into what is usually expressed more passively. Other words I have also attempted, but—only one century since Goethe—it is already difficult to coin the far-reaching new words that will express precisely what we are trying to incorporate into our age as a new kind of thinking. We can hardly remember that the word Bildung ‘education, training, formation’ goes back no further than the time of Goethe (1749–1832). Before that, there existed no educated (gebildete) people in Germany. That is, we did not speak of someone as ein gebildeter Mensch ‘a person of culture, well-educated’. Even in the second half of the eighteenth century the German language had still kept a strong, sculptural vitality, so that it was possible to form such words as Bildung or even Weltanschauung ‘world view’, a term that also appeared after Goethe’s time. One is indeed very fortunate to live in a language milieu that permits such new formations. This good fortune is evident when one’s books are translated into French, English, and other languages and one hears about the difficulties. Translators are working by the sweat of their brow as best they can, but always, when a person finishes something, another finds it horrible and no one else finds it any good. When you go into the matter more closely, it's clear that many things in my books simply can't be said in the same way in another language. I tell people: In German everything and anything is right; you can put the subject first or in the middle or at the end of the sentence—it will be more or less correct. The pedantic, dogmatic rule that something absolutely can't be said in a certain way does not yet exist in German as it does in the western languages. Imagine what we have come to when we're limited to stereotyped expressions! People cannot yet think as individuals but only in a sort of group spirit about the things they want to communicate to others. That is pre-eminently the case with the people of the western civilizations: They think in stereotyped phrases.

Actually, the German language in particular shows that what I would like to call the GENIUS OF LANGUAGE has gradually become rigid, and that German in our time is also approaching the state where we can't escape the stereotyped phrases. This was not so in Goethe’s time and even less so in earlier ages. It is part of the picture of the whole language development in Central Europe.

Not so long ago this Central Europe, stretching far to the East, was still inhabited by a primitive people with great spiritual gifts but with a relatively simple outward culture, one that evolved substantially from trade and the economic life. Then roundabout, by way of the East Germanic tribes at first, much of the spiritual culture of Greece was absorbed. Through this, a great many Greek words entered the Germanic languages of Central Europe that later became modern German. During the centuries when Christianity spread from the South to the North, its concepts, ideas, and images brought along an enormous quantity of vocabulary, because the Germanic tribes had no available expressions in their own languages for such things.

The word segnen ‘to bless’, for instance, is one of the words that came with Christianity. The specific concept of “blessing” did not exist in northern Germanic heathendom. There were indeed magic charms and they contained a magic power, but this was not of the same nature as a blessing. Segnen, the verb from the noun Segen, was taken into the language under the influence of Christianity; the word brought northward was signum, a ‘sign’. Do observe what the genius of language still possessed at that time: language-forming strength! Nowadays we are no longer able to reconstruct and rework an adopted word in such a way that signum could become Segen, a blessing. We would treat the adopted word as an unchanged import, because the force and vitality that once transformed and created from the innermost depths simply do not well up any more.

Many words we take as completely German are in fact intruders; they appeared with Christianity. Look at the word predigen ‘preach’. It is none other than the Latin praedicare, which also means ‘to preach’. It was still possible to reconstruct this word from inside out. We never had a genuinely German word for this Christian activity of preaching. You see, if we want to get to know the actual force in German that transforms the language, we must first pour it through a sieve to sift out everything that entered our Central European culture from other cultural streams. In many of our words you will hardly notice it. You speak about the Christmas festival, feeling a strong attachment to it. Weihnacht ‘Holy Night, Christmas’ is a genuine German word, but Fest festival’ is Roman, a Latin word that long ago became a German word. Fest goes back to the time when, along with Christianity, the most foreign elements found their way into the language, but at the same time were so transformed that we do not have at all the feeling today that they are imports. Who in the world remembers now that verdammen ‘condemn, damn’ is a Latin word that has become good German? We have to sift a great deal if we want to get to what is really the German language proper.

Many things came in with Christianity; others have entered because out of Christianity the whole system of education developed. The subject matter for educating was taken over in exactly the form it had in the South in the Greco-Latin culture. And there were no Germanic words for what had to be communicated. Along with the concepts, the vocabulary had to be imported. This happened first in the “Latin school” (high school), then it moved down into the lower school, and so today the basis of our education, the Schule ‘school’, itself is an imported word. Schule is no more a German word than scholasticism. Klasse ‘class’ is obviously a foreign word. Wherever you look: Tafel ‘blackboard’; cognate, table from tabula, schreiben ‘to write’; cognate, scribe are imports. Everything pertaining to school entered our language from outside; it came—with education itself—with Latin or the Romance languages from the South.

All this is one stratum that we have to sift off if we want to study the character of the German language proper. Almost all the specifically foreign words must be lifted off, because they do not express what comes out of the German folk soul but have been poured over its real being, forming a kind of varnish on its surface. We have to look for what lies underneath the surface. For instance, if we look beneath the varnish for things pertaining to education; we find relatively little, but that much is distinctive: Lehrer ‘teacher’, for one, a genuinely original German word, as is the word Buchstabe ‘letter of the alphabet'—Buch ‘book’ is derived from it. It takes us back to the staves or sticks thrown down in ancient times to form the letters or runes that made up the runic words. They were beechwood sticks (Buche = ‘beech’). From this then came the zusammenlesen ‘gathering together’, from which comes lesen ‘to pick up’, as well as ‘to read’ and then the Leser ‘reader’, which became Lehrer ‘teacher’. These are ancient Germanic formulations, but you see that they have a totally different character, leading us back everywhere to the soul life of that time in Central Europe. The old heathen ways and the Christian ways collided, and with them the two elements of language, the northern and the southern. You can imagine what a strong power of interpenetration must have existed within the German language during the first millennium after the Mystery of Golgotha, that it could accept Christianity as strongly as it did and be at the same time able to accept the words that expressed the most essential mysteries of Christianity.

With this import, however, only one layer has been described, leading us back into the very early times connected with the great Germanic migrations, when the first Romance language stratum worked its way into the German language. Later the Romance languages were again to exert their influence. We can observe a second stratum originating from the Romance languages through various occurrences but this time coming from the West. Beginning in the twelfth century and continuing into the eighteenth, French words were taken over continually, French words for which there existed concepts and feelings, but by means of which the concepts and feelings were also modified. I have jotted down a number of these words but cannot claim any sort of completeness, for these lectures are being improvised from memory. I have tried to take words that seem truly German: for instance, the word fein ‘fine’. You won't find this word before the twelfth century; it came by way of fin from the French. Here you can see how the language-forming power in the thirteenth century was still strong enough to transform a word so well that it is felt today to be a genuine German word. Even a word like Kumpan ‘fellow, companion’, which has become very popular, is only an adaptation of compagnon, and a word we often hear nowadays, Partei ‘political party’ also immigrated at that time, as well as Tanz ‘dance’. All these words have been in the German language only since the second invasion of the twelfth century, which I would like to call French: Schach ‘chess’, Matt ‘checkmate’, Karte ‘card’, Ass ‘ace’, kaputt ‘broken’, and so forth. It is quite remarkable how many words came into Germany from the West, from France, during the twelfth and through the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, all of them contributing to the language an element of lightness, of easiness, where the German had a more ponderous quality. Before this time what had been spoken in German areas had a fuller, more rounded character. In it one couldn't very well have expressed playfulness. It would have been quite easy to say, Du bist ein kühner Held “You are a bold hero'—the German language could have managed that—but not, Du bist ein feiner Kerl 'You're a fine fellow’. That could not have been said earlier, for one needed the word fein. Other things would have been just as impossible without the invasion of the French elements.

From Italy, remarkably little reached the more northern areas until, at the time of the Renaissance, some words relating to music came; that was all. However, a third kind of invasion, though not so pervasive, came later by way of a detour through southern Germany and Austria, bringing such words as bizarr ‘odd, eccentric’, lila ‘purple’, [obviously related to lilac] which had not existed earlier in German, Neger ‘negro’, Tomate ‘tomato’, all imported from Spain. Now the introduction of foreign elements enters a new phase; it is obvious that the genius of language is no longer as flexible as it had been. These later words are much more similar to their originals. And finally, when the Germans reached the stage of admitting English words, things had become most unfavorable; this was actually not until the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Words came into the language that related mostly to outer affairs, but they remained practically the same as in English. The German language genius had by then lost its capacity to adapt and completely absorb into itself something new.

I have tried to point out how in early times the ability to accept and transform language was extraordinarily strong, especially within the Germanic languages and early German. Take, for instance, (and I want to emphasize this in particular) a word that is so German that even a person very sensitive to dialects can really not doubt its authenticity: Riegelwand for Fachwerkwand ‘half-timbered wall’. Riegel ... truly German, as the tongue tastes and pronounces it! And yet this word was not part of the German language until the time when Latin-Italian trained architects used the kind of materials that could construct the Riegelwände. Who is aware today that this word Riegel, so typically German, is nothing other than Regel, regula Latin: ‘rule’. We would not be capable of such changes in our present language. We also think Keller ‘cellar’ is an original German word, but no! It is nothing but an adapted loan-word from the Latin cellarium. I can give you another totally German-looking word to show you how difficult it would have been if people had begun to weed out and eliminate all the foreign words, as certain movements some time ago wanted to do. If that had happened, Riegel would have fallen by the wayside, Keller would have fallen—but do you know what other word would have had to go? Schuster ‘shoemaker’! As a matter of fact, Schuster came into the German language because people from the South taught the Germans to sew their foot-coverings instead of tying them together. The Latin sutor (cf. English: suture) refers to the sewing of footwear and has been assimilated into Schuster; an all-out foreign word.

You can see from this that we really have to sift vigorously to arrive at words of true German origin. We can not just accept what is floating nowadays on the surface of language, for this follows totally different laws. When we want to go back to the true speech-creating forces out of the genius of language, we must first of all sift off what is extraneous. The forming of language takes its course in a peculiar sort of way. You can see this very well by observing how things can still be introduced into a language—I would like to call it, through a certain kind of tyranny, from the bottom up—even when the language-forming genius no longer possesses its full strength. Not so many years ago, for instance, the following took place in Central Europe. Close to Raab there is a small town called Kocsi [now Kocs in Hungary]. I believe it was in the sixteenth century that an inventive fellow in this small place near Raab got the idea of building practical wagons that became very popular for people to drive and ride in. They made the little town well known. And just as Frankfurt sausages are known as ‘frankfurters’, these wagons were called kocsi. Just think how much carrying force was alive in this word, which grew into Kutsche ‘coach’; it traveled to France and even reached the proud English! Yet this word is not especially old; it has moved in relatively recent times with a certain dynamic power in all directions from the wagonmaker in Kocs.

So let us understand this clearly: When we deal with a language already formed, we must remove many outer layers in order to reach the kernel proper. If we do reach this innermost part, we have to say: This kernel shows us without a doubt that it could develop with inner, language-forming strength only at the time when thoughts were much deeper and more substantive than they are, for instance, in German culture today. For this to happen, thoughts must be much more inherent in the whole human being. At the present time we can no longer feel that the force we perceive in our thoughts is also present in our words.

Sometimes we feel this force when we go back to the dialects that are to be found at a deeper, earlier stage of the language. At present, to express quickness we say Blitz ‘lightning’. In certain southern German dialects the word is still Himmlizer. When you say that, you have the whole Blitzform ‘shape of the lightning’ in it: [Himmel is ‘heaven’;—lizer reminds one of licht, ‘light’]. In this word there is a visualization of what takes on form in nature. In short, dialects still reach back to word-forms within which there is an echo of the happenings outside us in nature. This is always the case in the inmost kernel of a language, where the conceptual or ideational element is much closer to the element of sound. Through the history of the German language in particular we can observe how in earlier times, before language became abstract, it was still a matter of course that the meaning of words was imbedded in their sound. I would like to call it a penetration of sense into sound. A sensitive person can still feel it in such words as Tag 'day’; Anglo-Saxon, daeg, a truly original, ancient German word—can feel it in the /t/ and /a:/ (/ah/) sounds, especially through the help of eurythmy. Words that came later were formed out of abstract ideas. Look at the rather modern given name Leberecht ‘liveright’. Parents endow a child with such a name in order to guide him or her with certainty along a virtuous path in life. There’s also Traugott ‘trust-God’. When such words came about, a certain language-forming element still existed but it was abstract, did not arise from a genuine inner source.

I wanted to say all this today as a preparation, so that we can proceed toward more concrete concepts and examples of language.

• 1. In German, we find two words for many things, as in English: will and testament, send and transmit, etc., one Germanic (Anglo-Saxon), the other Greco-Latin. In academic writing, the latter is usually preferred.

I would like to repeat what I told you yesterday: Please don't expect too much content from this very brief language study. I will make only a few remarks about the development of language in this improvised course. However, it is certainly worthwhile to stir up some thoughts on the subject, and perhaps from the way I present things, you will discover guidelines. I won't go into the usual facts, but I will try to show you a number of important ways to look at the life of language with a view to its organic evolving.

In my first lecture I referred to the development of our German language through “invasions” into its word-stock. We pointed to the significant one, which coincided with the streaming in of Christianity into northern cultures, and its consequences. Christianity did not simply bring in its own content; it brought this content in the form of word images. Considered outwardly, the folk religions of the northern and central European peoples were not at all similar to what came to them as a new religion; nor was it possible for them to grasp the content of Christianity with the words and sounds of northern and central Europe. Therefore, those who brought Christian concepts and Christian perceptions also brought their “word clothing.” We have cited a group of such words that were carried northward, we can say, on the wings of Christianity. In the same way, everything connected with schooling streamed northward, too, words like Schule ‘school' itself, Tafel ‘blackboard’, and so forth, with the exception of a few like Lesen, Buchstabe, Lehrer (see Lecture 1, pages 19-20). The former are of Latin origin, but have been integrated into the German language organization so thoroughly that no one today would recognize them as loan-words. I also described how later, beginning in the twelfth century, a new invasion arrived from the West, bringing in many language elements. After that came a Spanish wave and finally one from England, as late as the nineteenth century.

These examples will be elaborated on later, but they indicate that during the time Christianity and everything related to it were making their way northward, the genius of the language was still able to accept and transform it inwardly by means of the folk sensitivity in that region. I illustrated this unique fact not by a word pertaining to Christianity but by the connection of the word Schuster ‘shoemaker’, which seems so truly Germanic, with sutor: it is one and the same word (page 22-23). There was still so much speech-forming strength in the genius of the Germanic folk that it was possible to transform a word like sutor that belongs to the earliest invasion. The further we proceed from this to the next invasion, which was concerned with education, the more we find the sound of the word in German closer to the sound in Latin. And so it continued. Languages flowing in later found the German language spirit ever less capable of transforming whatever came toward it. Let us keep this in mind. It remains to be seen whether, in due time, such phrases as five o'clock tea will be changed; that is, whether the German language genius can develop over a relatively long span of time the power of more rapid transformation it possessed in early times. We will have to wait and see. At the moment, it is not important.

We must ask ourselves what significance it has for a people that its language-forming power is decreasing, at least temporarily; that in fact it no longer exists as it once was. You do find it more strongly today in dialects. For instance, we could search for the origin of a very strange word in the Austrian dialect: pakschierli or bakschierli. The Austrians sitting here certainly know it. You can quickly sense what pakschierli means: ‘a cunning little girl who bobs and curtseys when presented to strangers, a ‘charming little girl—that’s pakschierli—or a ‘funny little thing made of marzipan' that doesn't exactly make you laugh, but causes an inward state of being ready, if the impression you get grows a little, to burst out in a loud laugh. ‘A funny little thing made of marzipan'—that’s pakschierli Now what is this word? It is not really connected with the rest of the Austrian dialect, for it is none other than the German word possierlich ‘funny, cunning, cute’, a word that has been transformed.

In a way, then, this language-forming power can be studied in the dialects. It is also a good approach to the active, creative folk soul, and an understanding of the folk soul would contribute immeasurably toward an understanding of the cultural life of a country. It would lead back to what I referred to in The Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and Humanity,¹ which was ridiculed by such minds as the all-too well-known Professor Dessoir.² Spiritual science makes it possible to determine clearly what I described there: that the formation of consonant sounds in language is connected to an imitation of something externally perceptible. Consonants express for us what we have experienced inwardly of outside events. To put it more graphically: If you are setting in a fence post, you can feel this action inwardly by bearing down (aufstemmen, as ‘stem’ for skiers) on your foot. This is the perception of your own act of will. We no longer feel this inner act of will in the sound [št, pronounced sht] of aufstemmen, but in the early age of language development, you did feel in your acts of will an imitation of what was happening outside yourself. The consonant element has thus become the imitation of events outside the human being, while the vowel element expresses what is truly an inner feeling. ‘Ah!" is our astonishment, a standing back, in a sense. The relationship of the human being to the outer world is expressed in the vowels. It is necessary to go back a long way in time if one wants to penetrate to these things, but it is possible to do so; then one arrives at the insight that such theories as the “bow-wow” or “ding-dong” theories are horribly wrong. They are incorrect and superficial. An understanding of the human being, however, can lead us toward discovering inwardly how a speech sound is connected with whatever we want to reveal of soul and spirit. Let us consider this as a question to ask ourselves, in order to find answers during the course of this study. In order to look rightly at the many and varied links in the chain of language, I will try to find characteristic examples to help us reach what we are trying to understand.

Today I should like to take some examples to show how language proceeds slowly from the concrete to the abstract. If we really want to study actual facts, turning to dialect again will be helpful. Let me mention one small example:

When Austrian peasants get up in the morning, they will say something about their Nachtschlaf ‘night sleep’ but not at all as you are apt to speak about it. You think of it basically as something quite abstract, for you are educated people. Austrian peasants are close to nature. To them, all that surrounds them partakes of spirit and soul, and they have a strong awareness of it. Even for them this is dying out now, but in the seventies and eighties of the last century, it was still very much present for anyone who, like me, wished to observe it. Even though peasants may still perceive the elemental forces in everything around them, they will never express it in abstractions but always concretely. A peasant will say, ‘I have to wipe the night sleep (Nachtschlaf) out of my eyes To peasants the substance excreted from the eyes during the night that can be washed away, is the visible expression of sleep; they call it Nachtschlaf To understand language that was still quite alive a short time ago, there is this secret: a factual understanding is not at all hindered by finding spiritual elements linked up with it. Austrian peasants are in fact thinking of an elemental being, but they express this by describing its action, that it put an excretion into their eyes. Never would they take this word as the abstraction arrived at by an educated person. However, if peasants have gone to school a little while or have been exposed to the city, they have a way of addressing themselves to an invisible, concrete fact. They will still say, ‘T must wipe the night sleep out of my eyes,” but at the same time they will make a sort of gesture to imply that for them it is something really superficial and yet concrete.

We should be aware that such an observation leads us to realize that an abstract term always points back to something more concrete. Take the following example. In the Scandinavian countries you still find the word barn for ‘child’ [Scotland and northern England, bairn]; we no longer have it in German. What is its history? On one hand, it leads us back to the Gothic; we will find it in Ulfilas’s Bible translation,³ where we find the expression bairan, meaning ‘to bear’. If we know the law of consonant shift, discovered by Jakob Grimm,⁴ for the Germanic languages and for all those related to them [see lecture 3, page 41-42], we will go back from the Gothic bairan to pherō in Greek and fero in Latin, both meaning ‘to carry’ or ‘to bear’. A /b/ in Germanic appears in Greek and Latin as /f/ or /ph/. Bairan is simply a Germanic sound-shift from fero; the word widens out into a different direction. There exists the Old High German word beran, ‘to carry’ [beran is also the Anglo-Saxon forerunner of English ‘to bear’. The barrow of ‘wheelbarrow’ goes back to beran.]. Gradually the verbal aspect of the word receded; in modern German we no longer have the possibility of thinking back to the original, strongly felt, active meaning. Why is the child called barn in Scandinavia? Because it is being borne or carried before it comes into the world. A child is something that is carried: we look back at our origin. The only word left over from all this in modern German is gebären ‘to bear, give birth'.

But we do have something else—we have retained the suffix -bar. You will find that in fruchtbar ‘fertile’, kostbar ‘costly’, ‘precious’ and other words. What is kostbar?—that which carries a cost. What is fruchtbar?—that which bears fruit. It was expressed very graphically, not as an abstraction as it would be today, for the actual carrying, bearing was visualized.

You can imagine this quite vividly when you say something is becoming ruchbar ‘known’, ‘notorious’, not always in the most positive sense; literally, ‘smell bearing’. When a smell is being carried toward you, a matter is becoming ruchbar. For many words like this we should be able to find the clear, direct imagery that in ancient times characterized the language-forming genius.

I will write down for you a phrase from Ulfilas’s Bible translation:

jah witands Jêsus thôs mitônins izê qath

This means approximately, ‘And Jesus, knowing their thoughts, spoke thus.” [Note qath = Anglo-Saxon, cwaeth/ quoth.] The word mitonins means ‘thoughts’ and this takes us to miton, meaning roughly ‘to think’. In Old High German it grew into something different: mezzôn; related to this is the word mezzan which means messen ‘to measure’. Measuring, the outer visible act of measuring, experienced inwardly, simply becomes thinking. Thus an action carried out outside ourselves has provided the foundation for the word thinking ‘I am thinking’ actually means: ‘T am measuring something in my soul’. This in turn is related to the Latin word meditor and the Greek medomai, which have given us ‘meditate’.

Whenever we go back in time and observe the genius of language at work, we find this presence of imagery, but we must also try to observe it with inner understanding. You all know the term Hagesfolz ‘a confirmed bachelor’; you know its approximate meaning today. However, the connection of this word with what it meant formerly is very interesting. It goes back to the word Hagestalt, in which the word Stalt is embedded [modern German retained only the word Gestalt: ‘figure, form, stature’]. What is Stalt? It is a person who has been put, placed, or ‘stood’ somewhere. According to medieval custom, the oldest son inherited the farm; the younger son got only the hedged-in field, the Hag. The younger son, therefore, who only owned the Hag was placed or ‘stood’ in this fenced-in field, and was often not able to marry. The stalt is the owner. The ‘hedge’ owner is the Hagestalt. As awareness of the word stalt gradually disappeared, people turned stalt into stolz (proud). It has no connection with the modern word stolz (proud); there is simply a resemblance of sounds. But an awareness of this stalt ‘placed or stood’ can be found in other, older examples still in existence, for instance in the Oberufer Nativity Play.⁵ One of the innkeepers says I als ein Wirt von meiner G'stalt, hab in mei’ Haus und Losament G'walt [I, an innkeeper of my stature—or an innkeeper placed here—take full charge in my house]. People think he means physical stature, but what he really means is ‘Placed in this respected house, stood here...." With the words that follow, “Take full charge,” he means that he attracts his guests. There is still the consciousness in G'stalt of what originally was in Hagestalt. We should follow with our whole inner being the development of words and sounds in this way, in order to ponder inwardly the unusual and delicate effects of the genius of language.

In the New Testament, describing how the disciples were astonished at Christ’s healing of the man sick of the palsy, Ulfilas uses a word in his translation related to silda-leik = selt-sam-leich ‘seldom-like’. Considering the way Ulfilas uses this word in the context of his Bible translation, we discover that he means here—for what has been accomplished by Christ—das Seltsamgestaltete ‘that which has been formed miraculously'. It is the bodily-physical element that arouses astonishment at this point. This is expressed more objectively in silda-leik. In the word leik we must sense: it is the gestalt, the form, but as an image. If the word gestalt were used in the earlier sense, it would be to express ‘being placed’. The form (Gestalt today), as it earlier was felt, described the image of a thing and was expressed by leik. We have this word in leichnam ‘corpse’. A corpse is the image of what was once there. It is a subtle expression when you sense what lies in this Leich, how the Leich is not a human being but the ‘likeness’ of one.

There are further examples I can bring you for the development of terms springing from visual imagery to express a quality of soul. We learn from Ulfilas that in the Gothic language ‘bride’ is brûths. This bruths in the Bible translation is closely related to ‘brood’ (Brut), so that when a marriage is entered upon, the brood is being provided. The “bride” is the one who ensures the ‘brood’. Well then, what is the Bräutigam (the ‘bridegroom’)? Something is added to the bride; this is in Gothic guma, in Old High German gomo [in Anglo-Saxon, guma), derived by consonant shift from the Latin word homo, ‘man’, ‘the man of the bride’, the man who for his part provides for the brood [the addition of /r/ in the English groom is due to confusion with, or substitution of groom, servant]. You see, we have to look at the unassuming syllables sometimes if we really wish to follow the genius of language in its active forming of language.

Now it is remarkable that in Ulfilas’s translation the Gothic sa dumba ‘der Dumpfe’, ‘the dull one’, appears, denoting the man unable to speak, the dumb man whom the Christ heals (Matthew 9:32). With this, I would like to remind you that Goethe has told us how in his youth he existed in a certain kind of Dumpfheit ‘dullness’. “Dullness” is a state of being unable to see clearly through one’s surroundings, to live in shadows, in fogginess; this hinders, for one thing, the capacity for speech, renders mute. Later this word became dumm, took the meaning of ‘dumb’ or ‘stupid’, so that this dumb means nothing more than ‘not able to look about freely’ or ‘to live in dullness’ or ‘in a fog.” It is truly extraordinary, my dear friends, how many changes and transformations of a word can exist.⁶ These changes and recastings show how the conscious and the unconscious are interwoven in the marvelous being called the genius of language that expresses itself through the totality of a folk, tribe, or people.

There is, for instance, the name of the Nordic god Fjögyn. This name appears in a clarifying light through Ulfilas’s use of the word fairguni as Gothic for ‘mountain’, in telling of Christ’s “going up into the mountain” with his disciples. Its meaning shifted a little but we still find the word in Old High German as forha, meaning ‘fir tree’ or ‘fir mountain’. Fjögyn is the elemental god or goddess who resides on the fir mountain. This in turn (and we can sense it in fairguni) is related to the Latin word quercus ‘oak tree’, which also names the tree.

I should like to point out how in earlier ages of languageforming there prevailed—though somewhat subconsciously—a connection between sound and meaning. Nowadays it is almost impossible for us with our abstract thinking to reach down to the speech sounds. We no longer have a feeling for the sound quality of words. People who know many languages are downright annoyed if they are expected to consider anything about speech sounds. Words in general have the most varied transitions of form and meaning, of course; translations following only the dictionary are artificial and pedantic. First of all, we should follow the genius of language, which really has something other in mind than what seems obvious at first glance.

In German we say Kopf ‘head’; in the Romance languages it is testa, tête. Why do we say Kopf? Simply because in German we have a sculptural language genius and we want to express the roundness of the head. Kopf is related to kugelig ‘spherical’, and whether we speak of Kohlkopf ‘cabbage head’ or human Kopf it has originated from the same language-molding process. Kopf expresses what is round. Testa, however, ‘head’ in Latin, denotes something in our inner being: testifying, ascertaining, determining. We always have to consider that things may be named from various points of view. One can still feel this—though it’s possible to miss the details—if we try to trace our way back to older forms from which the present word originated. Finally we arrive far back in time when the genius of language was able to sense the spiritual life within the sounds themselves.

Who can still sense that meinen ‘to mean’ and Gemeinde ‘community, parish’ belong together? Nowadays this is difficult to perceive. In Old High German Gemeinde is gimeinida. 1f you look at a further metamorphosis to mean as an English cognate [Anglo-Saxon, maenan, ‘to recite, to tell' and AngloSaxon, gemaene, ‘common, general’], it is evident that gemeinida expresses what is ‘meant’ or ‘arrived at’ by several people in common; it derives strength from the fact that several people are involved. And this act of receiving strength is expressed by adding such a prefix as gi- [related to Anglo-Saxon be-, in bedazzle, behold, and so forth. In modern German ge- is the prefix of most past participles.].

We have to reach back and try to find the element of feeling in the forming of speech. Today when we say taufen, an ancient German word, ‘to baptize’, we no longer have a feeling for what it really is. We get more of a picture when we go back to Old and Middle High German, where we find toufan, toufen, töufen and find this related to diups [who can resist finding a connection to dip, Anglo-Saxon, dyppan?], and in Ulfilass daupjan related to daupjands, the Baptist. We have in Old High German the close cognate tiof in Modern German tief ‘deep’'—so there we have the relationship taufen ... hineintiefen ... tauchen ‘dip in, dive in’. It is simply a dipping into the water.

These things should help us to look carefully at the language-forming genius. Observing changes of meaning is especially important. In the following example there is an interesting shift of meaning. ‘Bread” was in Gothic hlaifs Old High German leiba, Middle High German leip, Anglo-Saxon, hlaf modern German das Brot. Hlaifs/hlaf has not retained the meaning ‘bread’; it has changed into laib/loaf. It means now only the form in which bread is made; earlier it was the bread itself.

You can observe this change of meaning in the metamorphosis from Old English hlaford from the earlier hlafweard, ‘bread keeper or guard.” The hlaford was the person who wards or guards the bread, the one you had to ask if you wanted bread, who watched over the bread, had the right to plant the field, make the bread, give the bread to those who were not freemen. And by means of a gradual transformation—the /h/ is lost—the word lord developed; ‘lord’ is the old hlafweard.

The companion word is equally interesting. Whereas hlaifs becomes ‘loaf of bread’, another word appeared through metamorphosis: hlaefdige in Old English. The first part of the word is again ‘loaf of bread’; dige developed from an activity. If dough (Anglo-Saxon dag Modern German Teig is being kneaded, this activity is expressed in the word dige, digan, to knead dough. If you seek the person who carries out this activity, you will arrive at the wife of the lord. The lord was the bread-warden; his wife was the bread-kneader, bread-giver. The word ‘lady’ grew out of hlaefdjge. In a mysterious way, ‘lord’ and ‘lady’ are related to the loaf of bread and show their origin as ‘bread-warden’ and ‘bread-kneader’.

We must really try to grasp the difference between our modern abstract attitude toward language and one that was truly alive in earlier times. People felt then that speech-sounds carried in themselves the spirit qualities, the soul qualities, that human beings wanted to communicate.

• 1. Rudolf Steiner, The Spiritual Guidance of the Individual and Humanity (Hudson, NY: Anthroposophic Press, 1992.
• 2. Max Dessoir (1867-1947). Author, Von Jenseits der Seele: Die Geisteswissenschaft in kritischer Betrachtung (Stuttgart, 1917).
• 3. Ulfilas or Wulfila (Little Wolf) 331-383. Bishop of the Goths. He is said to have invented the alphabet he used in order to translate the Bible. It is our only remnant of the Gothic language, which became extinct in 400 A.D.
• 4. Jakob Grimm (1785--1863), German philologist and creator of Grimm's law. Interested principally in the relationship between the various Germanic languages, he was one of the great founders of comparative philology. He wrote German Grammar, German Mythology and—with his brother Wilhelm—the famous collection of German folk and household tales. The Brothers Grimm also planned and inaugurated the great German dictionary.
• 5. A.C. Harwood, Christmas Plays from Oberufer (Bristol, England: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1993).
• 6. See also Rudolf Steiner, Spiritual Relations in the Human Organism, lecture 2 (Spring Valley, NY: Mercury Press, 1984).